them at once and be done with it. I have sometimes had one cast a
sorrowing glance at the just fare pressed into his down-stretched palm,
and drive off in thankless silence; but any excess of payment was met
with eager gratitude. I preferred to buy the cabman's good-will, because
I find this is a world in which I am constantly buying the good-will of
people whom I do not care the least for, and I did not see why I should
make an exception of cabmen. Only once did I hold out against an
extortionate demand of theirs. That was with a cabman who drove me to
the station, and said: "I'll have to get another sixpence for this,
sir." "Well," I returned, with a hardihood which astonished me, "you
won't get it of me." But I was then leaving London, and was no longer
afraid. Now, such is the perversity of the human spirit, I am sorry he
did not get the other sixpence of me. One always regrets these acts of
justice, especially towards any class of fellow-beings whose habits of
prey are a sort of vested rights. It is even in your own interest to
suffer yourself to be plundered a little; it stimulates the imagination
of the plunderer to high conceptions of equity, of generosity, which
eventuate in deeds of exemplary honesty. Once, one of the party left a
shawl in the hansom of a cabman whom I had, after my custom and
principle, overpaid, and who had left us at a restaurant upon our second
thought against a gallery where we had first proposed to be put down. We
duly despaired, but we went and saw the pictures, and when we came out
of the gallery there was our good cabman lying in wait to identify us as
the losers of the shawl which he had found in his cab. Is it credible
that if he had been paid only his legal fare he would have been at such
virtuous pains? It may, indeed, be surmised that if the shawl was not
worth more than an imaginable reward for its restoration he was actuated
by self-interest, but this is a view of our common nature which I will
not take.