Here and there in London by James Ewing Ritchie

In one of the remotest of the Fejee Islands some Wesleyan missionaries, in the year 1851, landed a pair of horses. We read general excitement prevailed at the towns near, and a great muster gathered on the beach at the day of landing. It was long before the native mind got reconciled to the phenomenon. The people, we are told, were terrified if approached by a horse. They would jump into the river, run up cocoa-nut and other trees, and climb houses for safety while the animal passed their place. In England this stage of terror has long been passed, and horses themselves are gradually giving place to steam.

Nevertheless, for short traffic -- for transit to places where the snort of the steam engine will never be heard -- for crooked ways inimical to machinery -- for the convenience of those who like to be taken up and set down at their own doors -- for the comfort of the nervous, whose firm belief is, that for the regular railway traveller a fatal smash is only a question of time, the London omnibus is a permanent institution. It is difficult to perceive how people managed before it had an existence -- when the fare from Highbury to the Bank was a shilling, and when the traveller for the journey from Highgate to London, along the dreary wastes of Holloway, paid no less than half-a-crown, and when even for that exorbitant sum, as it would now be deemed, you had no chance of a trip unless you had booked your place. In those times happy -- yea, thrice happy -- were the fathers of families living beyond the sound of Bow bells. In these, how can a man help going to the bad, rise he ever so early, or sit he up ever so late, eat he ever so of the bread of carefulness, if mamma and daughters can ride from the furthest suburbs -- from remote Peckham or airy Paddington -- for the ridiculously small sum of sixpence, or even less, in a vehicle as luxuriously fitted up as a private carriage, to the shops so tempting to the female mind of the fashionable and dissipated West? Happily the evil is tending to cure itself. The ladies have acquired a mode of dressing which simply renders, in the majority of cases, the use of an omnibus an impossibility.