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"Get out o’ my back-hair! That must have been the brake I touched off," Hinchcliffe muttered, and repaired his error tumultuously.

We passed the cart as though we had been all Bruges belfry. Agg, from the post-office door, regarded us with a too pacific eye. I remembered later that the pretty postmistress looked on us pityingly.

Hinchcliffe wiped the sweat from his brow and drew breath. It was the first vehicle that he had passed, and I sympathised with him.

"You needn’t grip so hard," said my engineer. "She steers as easy as a bicycle."

"Ho! You suppose I ride bicycles up an’ down my engine-room?" was the answer. "I’ve other things to think about. She’s a terror. She’s a whistlin’ lunatic. I’d sooner run the old SouthEaster at Simonstown than her!"

"One of the nice things they say about her," I interrupted, "is that no engineer is needed to run this machine."

"No. They’d need about seven."

"ʻCommon-sense only is needed,’" I quoted.

"Make a note of that, Hinch. Just commonsense," Pyecroft put in.

"And now," I said, "we’ll have to take in water. There isn’t more than a couple of inches of water in the tank."

"Where d’you get it from?"

"Oh!—cottages and such-like."

"Yes, but that being so, where does your much-advertised twenty-five miles an hour come in? Ain’t a dung-cart more to the point?"