pry into everything
and ask a thousand questions, the thoughtful observer would be
fearful lest he were an idiot. The American small boy is not
idiotic; tested by his curiosity concerning automobiles, he is the
fruition of the centuries, the genius the world is awaiting, the
coming ruler of men and empires, or--who knows?--the coming master
of the automobile.

Happily, curiosity is not confined to the small boy; it is but
partially suppressed in his elders,--and that is lucky, for his
elders, and their horses, can often help.

The young chauffeur is panicky if he comes to a stop on a lonely
road, where no human habitation is visible; he fears he may never
get away, that no help will come; that he must abandon his machine
and walk miles for assistance. The old chauffeur knows better. It
matters not to him how lonely the road, how remote the spot, one
or two plaintive blasts of the horn and, like mushrooms, human
beings begin to spring up; whence they come is a mystery to you;
why they come equally a mystery to them, but come they will, and
to help they are willing, to the harnessing of horses and the
dragging of the heavy machine to such place as you desire.

This willingness, not to say eagerness, on the part of the farmer,
the truckman, the liveryman, in short, the owner of horses, to
help out a machine he despises, which frightens his horses and
causes him no end of trouble, is an interesting trait of human
nature; a veritable heaping of coals of fire. So long as the
machine is careering along in the full tide of glory, clearing and
monopolizing the highway, the horse owner wishes it in Hades; but
let the machine get into trouble, and the same horse owner will
pull up out of the ditch into which he has been driven, hitch his
horses to the cause of his scare, haul it to his stable, and make
room by turning his Sunday carryall into the lane, and four
farmers, three truckmen, and two liverymen out of five will refuse
all offers of payment for their trouble.

But how galling to the pride of the automobilist to see a pair of
horses patiently pulling his machine along the highway, and how he
fights against such an unnatural ending of a day's run.

The real chauffeur, the man who knows his machine, who can run it,
who is something more than a puller of levers and a twister of
wheels, will not seek or permit the aid of horse or any other
power, except where the trouble is such that no human ingenuity
can repair on the