Page:Motors and motor-driving (1902).djvu/418

372 Reminiscences would not be complete without a few words on two common troubles that afflict the (motoring) just—sideslips and punctures. Both of these would supply a volume of the Badminton Library in the way of anecdotes tragic and the opposite. As regards side-slips I shall mention only one. Mr. Edmunds was driving along Victoria Street, and intended to pass between two vehicles, when suddenly the guaranteed non-stop butcher's cart was driven by the unspeakable butcher's boy right into the vacant space. Mr. Edmunds did his best to pull up. The car did her best to turn round, and succeeded in going round all the points of the compass, all other vehicles flying before her pirouetting form. As she came round in went the clutch, and she rode gaily forward along the cleared road. Lady sitting behind leans over to Mr. Edmunds, and says sweetly, 'How delightful!—that was a most marvellous piece of steering. I wouldn't have missed seeing such a feat of skill for anything.'

Autocar punctures form the one exception to the rule against implicit belief in travellers' tales. No one can exaggerate about them, and no one would if he could. May I slightly alter the ancient prophet's word, and say, a propos of the pneumatic tyre, that 'man is born to trouble as the ' dust 'flies upwards'? The autocarist who runs on pneumatic tyres has atra cura ever sitting behind him in his chariot. At any moment his wheel and his spirits may go down literally 'like a shot,' and the gay spark who is beating records in speed and in dust raising, may find himself trying to look happy in the middle of a crowd that gapes, and it may be jeers, and in the English sense shows itself the profane vulgar, while he is toiling out his soul, and blowing up his car in more senses than one.

As a contrast to this let me give my experience when bringing my car from the builders in Paris; 150 miles had to be run in one day from Beauvais to Dunkirk before 8 o'clock to catch the steamer for Leith. At St. Omer I found a carpet stud up to the head in one tyre, and at another halt I found a scar about an inch long in the other driving tyre. Each of these would have made it impossible for us to cover the 150 miles in time had