I had often before ridden in omnibuses to amuse myself by observing
the passengers. An omnibus has always appeared to me, to be a
perambulatory exhibition-room of the eccentricities of human nature. I
know not any other sphere in which persons of all classes and all
temperaments are so oddly collected together, and so immediately
contrasted and confronted with each other. To watch merely the
different methods of getting into the vehicle, and taking their seats,
adopted by different people, is to study no incomplete commentary on
the infinitesimal varieties of human character--as various even as the
varieties of the human face.

Thus, in addition to the idle impulse, there was the idea of amusement
in my thoughts, as I stopped the public vehicle, and added one to the
number of the conductor's passengers.

There were five persons in the omnibus when I entered it. Two
middle-aged ladies, dressed with amazing splendour in silks and
satins, wearing straw-coloured kid gloves, and carrying highly-scented
pocket handkerchiefs, sat apart at the end of the vehicle; trying to
look as if they occupied it under protest, and preserving the most
stately gravity and silence. They evidently felt that their
magnificent outward adornments were exhibited in a very unworthy
locality, and among a very uncongenial company.

One side, close to the door, was occupied by a lean, withered old man,
very shabbily dressed in black, who sat eternally mumbling something
between his toothless jaws. Occasionally, to the evident disgust of
the genteel ladies, he wiped his bald head and wrinkled forehead with
a ragged blue cotton handkerchief, which he kept in the crown of his
hat.