day for an obsolete tooth-brush.
"I want to clean spark-plugs with it," he explained.

"Next," she replied, icily, "you'll be taking your little pet to the
dentist, I suppose."

From such encounters Jay-eems would creep back to the barn and seek
consolation in tinkering around me.

He liked to take the lid off my transmission-box and gaze at my
wondrous works. He was always tightening my axle-burrs, or dosing me
with kerosene through my hot-air pipe, or toying with my timer.
While he was never so smart as Willie about such things, he was
intelligent and quick to learn; and this was not surprising to me
after I discovered the nature of his occupation in life.

I had taken him to be a retired silk-worm fancier, a chronic juryman,
or something of the sort. But shiver my windshield if he wasn't a
professor in a college!

On the morning when first he dared to drive me to his work, the
college must have got wind of our coming, for the students turned
out in a body to cheer him as he steered in at the campus gate, and
the faculty gathered on the steps to shake his hand.

A bald-headed preceptor asked him if he meant to cyanide me and
mount me on a pin for preservation in the college museum. The
chancellor inquired if Todd had identified me. Todd said he had. He
said I was a perfect specimen of _Automobilum cursus gandium_, the
most beautiful species of the _Golikellece_ family. It was the
nearest he ever came to profanity in my hearing. I suppose he got it
from associating with Willie.

They demanded a speech, and he made one--about me. He said that my
name was _Hilaritas_, signifying joy. He said, among other
flattering things, that I was no common mundane contraption, though
such I might seem to the untutored eye. In their studies of the
Greek drama they had read of gods from the machine. I was a machine
from the gods. In my cylinders I consumed nectar vapour, in my
goo-cups ambrosia, in my radiator flowed the crystal waters of the
Fount of Bandusia.

Three other items of his eulogium I remember: The breath of Pan
inflated my tires, I could climb Olympus in high, and he, James Todd,
a mere professor in a college, while sitting at my wheel, would not
bare his head to Zeus himself, no, nor even to the chairman of the
college board of trustees.

His nonsense appeared to be as popular in that part of town as it
was unpopular in another. They gave the varsity yell with his name
at the end.

The day came when Mrs. T