Page:Motors and motor-driving (1902).djvu/52

28 of a hundred the vehicle will perform its work up to time, and, so far as I can speak from my own experience, you ought never to miss your train or your appointment if the car is efficiently superintended. One thinks a good deal in the country of going by train to one's station, say a hundred miles from London, in about two hours, and you naturally remark on the excellence of the railway service, but from there to your house, a distance of, perhaps, six miles, often takes you an hour in the country fly. The first part of your journey was completed at the rate of fifty miles an hour, the final average from door to door works out at a little over thirty. If the train service from your station is quickened to any centre which you are using by ten minutes in two hours, you think it is an extraordinary improvement and everybody praises the railway company; but with a motor you may save thirty minutes in every hour over the horse-drawn vehicle even in ordinary weather, and when it comes to snow and frost and slippery roads the saving might easily amount to far more.

And when you are in your country house what an added joy to your daily life! Perhaps you are surrounded by a few near neighbours of whom you have seen almost too much, and beyond them a wider circle of friends from ten to twenty miles off, or even more, whom, without previous arrangement as to change of horses, you cannot conveniently reach. These now become quite accessible, and a shoot twenty miles from home can be undertaken, or you can lunch with your neighbour five-and-twenty miles off as easily in 1902 as in 1892 you could meet your friend living seven miles from your door. All this makes for an improvement of the social conditions of country life, a widening of its opportunities, a better knowledge of your county, and less boredom with your parish. But beware of the local Bench in the matter of speed. They may be sensible, and the policeman kind or blind, but all are not so. The poetry of pace generally leads to a payment before the prejudiced. Above all be a gentleman on the road as well as off it. It pays.