'How mean of you!' the other whined;
'You've bought the best, I see,
And in the market I shall find
The worst is left for me.'

The Rabbit mutely turned away
From language so unfair;
He trotted home, and from that day
He shunned the lazy Hare.

'For this,' said he, 'is plain to me,
All lazy folk are prone
To blame their friends, and never see
The fault is theirs alone.'

A MOTOR-CAR OF THE PAST.

Motorists have cause to be thankful they live in a good-natured age. Of
course, they are often blamed for accidents, not always deservedly; but
had they lived in the early part of the nineteenth century, they would
have been much worse off. About that time, several persons constructed
steam carriages, meant to run upon ordinary roads; the popular anger,
however, was so great that they had to give up running them. Nearly
every town and village greeted them with jeers and hostile cries, with
occasional presents of brickbats or stones, and it happened more than
once that a furious mob attacked a party, and tried to break the machine
to pieces.

[Illustration: An Old-fashioned Motor-car.]

Mr. Gurney was a notable contriver of such carriages. He had several, of
different styles, and probably the most remarkable of his experiments
was the making of one with a divided boiler, to relieve the fears which
were common then amongst people to whom steam was a novelty, and who
fancied that a boiler was in great danger of bursting from the pressure
of the steam. Some folk said that Mr. Gurney, who was a doctor, took the
idea of his peculiar boiler from the arteries and veins of the human
body; at any rate, he had a double arrangement of pipes, taking the form
of a horseshoe, and made of welded iron. There were forty pipes, so that
if one burst it could only do a trifling amount of harm, and the damage
was easily repaired. The principle was that of the 'water-tube' boilers
of the present day. Mr. Gurney had also what he called 'separators,'
which returned to the boiler any water that was not needed in the pipes.
A tank supplied water to the boiler by means of a pump with a flexible
hose; coke or charcoal was burnt in the furnace, so that there was very
little smoke, and the machinery moved almost noiselessly. It was
reckoned to be about twelve horse-power, and travelled at any rate
between four and fifteen miles an hour. Inside and outside the vehicle
eighteen