>There was a well-known author - I have forgotten his name - who claimed that he managed a similar situation (paying for a taxi, or the equivalent of that time, outside of his home town) as follows: He carried with him a bag with many small coins. When the time came to pay, he slowly put one coin after another into the hand of the taxi-driver, observing his face. If the taxi-driver smiled, he quickly withdrew the last penny.

That would be Dositej Obradović, the great educator and, BTW, the guy who ended periodic famines in post-Ottoman Serbia by introducing potatos. Though, him being quite often in mid-XIX century Vienna, he may have picked the trick from some other literary acquaintance of his.