time to get the young couple home; you know, alas! when the
courtship--blissful period of loitering for you--is ended and when
the marriage is made, by the tighter rein, the sharper word, and
the occasional swish of the whip. Ah, Dobbin, you and I--" The
Professor was becoming indiscreet.
"What do you know about love-making, Professor?"
"My dear fellow, it is the province of learning to know everything
and practise nothing."
"But Dobbin--"
"We all have had our Dobbins."
For some miles the road out of Erie was soft, dusty, narrow, and
poor--by no means fit for the proposed Erie-Buffalo race. About
fifteen miles out there is a sharp turn to the left and down a
steep incline with a ravine and stream below on the right,--a
dangerous turn at twenty miles an hour, to say nothing of forty or
fifty.
There is nothing to indicate that the road drops so suddenly after
making the turn, and we were bowling along at top speed; a wagon
coming around the corner threw us well to the outside, so that the
margin of safety was reduced to a minimum, even if the turn were
an easy one.
As we swung around the corner well over to the edge of the ravine,
we saw the grade we had to make. Nothing but a succession of small
rain gullies in the road saved us from going down the bank. By so
steering as to drop the skidding wheels on the outside into each
gully, the sliding of the machine received a series of violent
checks and we missed the brink of the ravine by a few inches.
A layman in the Professor's place would have jumped; but he, good
man, looked upon his escape as one of the incidents of automobile
travel.
"When I accepted your invitation, my dear fellow, I expected
something beyond the ordinary. I have not been disappointed."
It was a wonder the driving-wheels were not dished by the violent
side strains, but they were not even sprung. These wheels were of
wire tangential spokes; they do not look so well as the smart,
heavy, substantial wooden wheels one sees on nearly all imported
machines and on some American.
The sense of proportion between parts is sadly outraged by
spindle-wire wheels supporting the massive frame-work and body of
an automobile; however strong they may be in reality,
architecturally they are quite unfit, and no doubt the wooden
wheel will come more and more into general use.
A wooden wheel with the best of hickory spokes possesses an
elasticity entirely foreign to the rigid wire wheel, but good
Here's a piece of wisdom on driving or cute car quote to study:
I'm not sure... about automobiles.... With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization - that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men's souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can't have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that... the spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree... that automobiles 'had no business to be invented.' ~Eugene, from Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, 1918
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