til we have seen each new machine put up the clay
hill four miles south of town and have ridden in it over the Q. B. & C.
crossing and the other places which show up bad springs, we can't fix
our minds on our work. Time was when a new baby could come into Homeburg
and hold the attention of the town for a week. Now a baby is lucky if
its birth notice isn't crowded out of the _Democrat_ to make room for
the list of new machines.

As for those of us who haven't automobiles, life is pleasant and without
responsibilities. We ride in every new automobile, and, what is more, we
go over it as carefully as a farmer does a new horse. We open its hood
and pry into its internal economy. We crank it to test its
compression--half the Homeburg men who have achieved broken wrists by
the crank route haven't autos at all. We denounce the owner's judgment
on oils and take his machine violently away from him in order to prove
that it will pull better uphill with the spark retarded. At night,
during the summer, we hurry through supper and then go out on the front
porch to wait for a chance to act as ballast.

No automobile owner in the dirt roads belt will go out without a full
tonneau if he can help it--makes riding easier--and this means permanent
employment during the evenings for about three hundred friends all
summer long. In fact the demand for ballast is often greater than the
supply. As a result, we have become hideously spoiled. I have passed up
as many as six automobiles in an evening on various captious pretexts,
waiting all the time for Sim Bone's car, whose tonneau is long and
exactly fits my legs. Once or twice Sim has failed to come around after
I have waved the rest of the procession by, and we have had to stay at
home. I have spoken to him severely about this, and he is more careful
now.

Because of our great interest in automobiles, vicarious or otherwise,
there is no class-hatred in Homeburg. If a man were to stop by the
roadside and begin to denounce the automobile as an oppressor of the
pedestrian, he would in all probability be kidnaped by some acquaintance
before he was half through and carried forty miles away for company's
sake. About the only Homeburg resident who doesn't ride is old Auntie
Morley, who broke her leg in a bobsled sixty years ago and has had a
holy horror of speed ever since.

In fact the only classes we have are the privileged class who merely
ride in automobiles and the oppressed class who ride