ho minds and cares for the engine; he is
a _mecanicien_ and nothing else--in France and elsewhere. We needed a
word for the individual who busies himself with, or drives an
automobile, and so we have adapted the word _chauffeur_. Purists may
cavil, but nevertheless the word is better than _driver_, or
_motor_-_man_ (which is the quintessence of snobbery), or
_conductor_.

The word, _chauffeur_, the Paris _Figaro_ tells us, was known long
before the advent of automobiles or locomotives. History tells that
about the year 1795, men strangely accoutred, their faces covered
with soot and their eyes carefully disguised, entered, by night,
farms and lonely habitations and committed all sorts of depredations.
They garroted their victims, or dragged them before a great fire
where they burned the soles of their feet, and demanded information
as to the whereabouts of their money and jewels. Hence they were
called _chauffeurs_, a name which frightened our grandfathers as much
as the scorching _chauffeur_ to-day frightens our grandchildren.

A motor-car is a fearsome thing,--when it goes, it goes; and when it
doesn't, something, or many things, are wrong. A few years ago this
uncertainty was to be expected, for, though the makers will not
whisper it in Gath, we are only just getting out of the bone-shaker
age of automobiles.

Every one remembers what a weirdly ungraceful thing was the first
safety bicycle, and so was the gaudy painted-up early locomotive--and
they are so yet on certain English lines where their early Victorian
engines are like Kipling's ocean tramp, merely "puttied up with
paint." So with the early automobiles, they jarred and jerked and
stopped--that is, under all but exceptional conditions. Occasionally
they did wonderful things,--they always did, in fact, when one took
the word of their owners; but now they really do acquit themselves
with credit, and so the public, little by little, is beginning to
believe in them, even though the millennium has not arrived when
every home possesses its own runabout.

All this proves that we are "getting there" by degrees, and meantime
everybody that has to do with motor-cars has learned a great deal,
generally at somebody else's expense.

To-day every one "motes," or wants to, and likewise a knowledge of
many things mechanical, which had heretofore been between closed
covers, is in the daily litany of many who had previously never known
a clutch from a cam-shaft, or a sp