The army, it is pleasing to be able to say, is very well represented—largely by ex-noncommissioned officers. They do not wear their medals on their waistcoats, because they know that to be the practice of old soldiers in straitened circumstances, and also, alas! of rascally impostors who have never worn the Queen's uniform. If the conductors had uniforms, as the tram-men have, they would wear their medals.
The dissipated down-at-heel gentleman, of the type which sometimes drives a cab, never becomes an omnibus conductor, for the very good reason that no company or proprietor would employ him. But the unfortunate gentleman often does. An Oxford graduate was the conductor of a West-End omnibus for some considerable time, and a man who was once the secretary of a flourishing literary society, and a church organist, is and has been one for some years. And a City man, ruined in business, became, by the irony of fate, the conductor of the very omnibus on which he, formerly, rode up to town every morning.
A small proportion of conductors do possibly make occasional mistakes in their grammar, but that is no reason why a certain writer should
