now the County Council pauper lunatics
were enclosed, of Lady Bone's chintzes and crinolines. Nobody heeded
him. The world had thrown up a new type of gentleman altogether--a
gentleman of most ungentlemanly energy, a gentleman in dusty oilskins
and motor goggles and a wonderful cap, a stink-making gentleman, a
swift, high-class badger, who fled perpetually along high roads from the
dust and stink he perpetually made. And his lady, as they were able
to see her at Bun Hill, was a weather-bitten goddess, as free from
refinement as a gipsy--not so much dressed as packed for transit at a
high velocity.

So Bert grew up, filled with ideals of speed and enterprise, and
became, so far as he became anything, a kind of bicycle engineer of the
let's-have-a-look-at-it and enamel chipping variety. Even a road-racer,
geared to a hundred and twenty, failed to satisfy him, and for a time he
pined in vain at twenty miles an hour along roads that were continually
more dusty and more crowded with mechanical traffic. But at last his
savings accumulated, and his chance came. The hire-purchase system
bridged a financial gap, and one bright and memorable Sunday morning he
wheeled his new possession through the shop into the road, got on to it
with the advice and assistance of Grubb, and teuf-teuffed off into
the haze of the traffic-tortured high road, to add himself as one more
voluntary public danger to the amenities of the south of England.

"Orf to Brighton!" said old Smallways, regarding his youngest son from
the sitting-room window over the green-grocer's shop with something
between pride and reprobation. "When I was 'is age, I'd never been to
London, never bin south of Crawley--never bin anywhere on my own where
I couldn't walk. And nobody didn't go. Not unless they was gentry. Now
every body's orf everywhere; the whole dratted country sims flying to
pieces. Wonder they all get back. Orf to Brighton indeed! Anybody want
to buy 'orses?"

"You can't say _I_ bin to Brighton, father," said Tom.

"Nor don't want to go," said Jessica sharply; "creering about and
spendin' your money."

3

For a time the possibilities of the motor-bicycle so occupied Bert's
mind that he remained regardless of the new direction in which the
striving soul of man was finding exercise and refreshment. He failed
to observe that the type of motor-car, like the type of bicycle, was
settling-down and losing its adventurous quality. Indeed, it is as
true as it