r of one who brings an argument to a close, and I
hastened to start the car.

By Jove! The compression was strong! I wasn't prepared for it after the
simple twist of the hand, which is all that is necessary to start the
Napier, and the recoil of the starting-handle nearly broke my wrist. But
I got the engine going with the second try, jumped to my place in front
of the ladies (you understand that it is a phaeton-seated car), and
started very gingerly up the hill. Though I was once accustomed to a
belt-driven Benz (you remember my little 3-1/2 horse-power "halfpenny
Benz," as I came to call it), that had the ordinary fast and loose
pulleys, while this German monstrosity is driven by a jockey-pulley, an
appliance fiendishly contrived, as it seemed to me, especially for
breaking belts quickly. The car too is steered by a tiller worked with
the left hand, and there are so many different levers to manipulate
that to drive the thing properly one ought to be a modern Briareus.

I must say, though, that the thing has power. It bumbled in excellent
style on the second speed up the long hill of Suresnes; but when we got
to the level and changed speeds, I put the jockey on a trifle too
quickly, and snick! went the belt. I was awfully anxious that my new
mistress shouldn't think me a duffer, that she shouldn't lose confidence
in her car and me, and determine to bring her tour to an abrupt end; so
as soon as I felt the snap I turned round saying it was only a broken
belt that could be mended in no time. She smiled delightfully. "How nice
of you to take it so well!" she said. "Rattray seemed to think that when
a belt broke the end of the world had come."

Now to mend a belt seems the easiest thing going, and so it is when you
merely have to hammer a fastening through it and turn the ends over. But
in this car you have to make the joint with coils of twisted wire.
Simple as it is to do in a workshop, this belt-mending is a most
irritating affair by the roadside, and when done I found by subsequent
experiences that the wires wear through and tear out after less than a
hundred miles.

On this first day, not having the hang of the job, I found it
disgustingly tedious. To begin with, to get at the pulleys I had to open
the back of the car, and that meant lifting down all the carefully
strapped luggage and depositing it by the roadside. Then the wire and
tools were either in a cupboard under the floor of the car or in a box
under the l