end of the street. A crowd collected there, too.

"Oh, dear!" said Honora, "don't you think we ought to take the train,
Mr. Brent? If I were to miss a dinner at my own house, it would be too
terrible!"

"There's nothing to worry about," he assured her. "Nothing broken. It's
only the igniting system that needs adjustment."

Although this was so much Greek to Honora, she was reassured. Trixton
Brent inspired confidence. There was another argument with the
chauffeur, a little more animated than the first; more greasy plugs
taken out and wiped, and a sharper exchange of compliments with
the crowd; more grinding, until the chauffeur's face was steeped in
perspiration, and more pistol shots. They were off again, but lamely,
spurting a little at times, and again slowing down to the pace of an
ox-cart. Their progress became a series of illustrations of the fable of
the hare and the tortoise. They passed horses, and the horses shied
into the ditch: then the same horses passed them, usually at the periods
chosen by the demon under the hood to fire its pistol shots, and into
the ditch went the horses once more, their owners expressing their
thoughts in language at once vivid and unrestrained.

It is one of the blessed compensations of life that in times of
prosperity we do not remember our miseries. In these enlightened days,
when everybody owns an automobile and calmly travels from Chicago
to Boston if he chooses, we have forgotten the dark ages when these
machines were possessed by devils: when it took sometimes as much as
three hours to go twenty miles, and often longer than that. How many of
us have had the same experience as Honora!

She was always going to take the train, and didn't. Whenever her
mind was irrevocably made up, the automobile whirled away on all four
cylinders for a half a mile or so, until they were out of reach of the
railroad. There were trolley cars, to be sure, but those took forever to
get anywhere. Four o'clock struck, five and six, when at last the fiend
who had conspired with fate, having accomplished his evident purpose of
compelling Honora to miss her dinner, finally abandoned them as suddenly
and mysteriously as he had come, and the automobile was a lamb once
more. It was half-past six, and the sun had set, before they saw the
lights twinkling all yellow on the heights of Fort George. At that hour
the last train they could have taken to reach the dinner-party in time
was leaving the New York