Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/159

 I've mentioned in the quality of the road. To drive into this dim, pine-clad region was like driving back into the years a century or two. A motor-car was an anachronism, and if we came to grief our blood was upon our own heads. The way became grass-grown and rutty, and I was obliged to drive slowly. Deeper and deeper we penetrated into the forest, and deeper and deeper also we sank into the soft earth. Aunt Mary groaned and prophesied disaster as we crawled along in ruts up to our axles; but I think Miss Randolph and I would have perished sooner than retreat. I trusted in the Napier and she trusted in me. In one place the road had been mended with a covering of loose rocks rather than stones; we panted and crunched our way over them, enormously to the astonishment of the road-menders and one or two dark-faced peasants, perched like cranes on the old-fashioned stilts not yet utterly abandoned as a means of navigating this sea of sand and pines. Still, on we went, the engine labouring a little, like an over-worked heart; but it was a loyal heart, and the tyres, were trumps.

Miss Randolph said that if she were a tyre and condemned to such hard labour, she would burst out of sheer spite. I think Miss Kedison nearly did so as it was; but as for us (I suppose you can't conceive the satisfaction to a poor chauffeur of bracketing his lady and himself familiarly as "us"), we were intoxicated by the heavy balsam of the turpentine, for which every tree we passed was being sliced. On each a great flake of the trunk had been struck off