among a flock of
busted-looking pieces of machinery and begun talking fast. At first, I
didn't get him at all; but when I got sort of used to it I realized he
was saying something like this:

"The crank shaft is a steel drop-forging having arms extending from
center of shaft according to number of cylinders. It is used to change
the reciprocating movement of the piston into a rotary motion of the
flywheel; it has a starting handle at one end and the flywheel at the
other, as you observe. We will now pass on to the exhaust manifold,
which is generally constructed of cast iron; it conducts the burned
gases from the exhaust valve . . ."

"Hold on!" I says. "Exhaust is right! I'm exhausted this minute. If you
don't mind I'd like to sit down and talk sense, instead of listening to
a phonograph monologue in a foreign language."

The instructor bird seemed sort of winded by this; but he got a couple
of chairs and pretty soon we was sitting in a quiet corner talking like
we'd both been on the same circuit for five years.

"Now listen here, brother," I says real earnest; "I want to learn this
stuff, and learn it right! And I want you to stick by me and see me
through, same as you would any male man that come in here to learn to be
a chauffeur. Now take it easy and make me get it, and I'll play square
and do my best to understand, without no nonsense."

"Say, you bet I will, Miss La Tour!" says this bird, who, married or
not, had some spirit in him yet. "You bet I will! You see, a lot of
dames come in here just because they ain't got nothing else to do. And
you yourself must realize that a guy can only go through the motions
when that's all they want."

Well, I could see that plain enough, and from then on we got along like
a new team of partners with equal money in the act and going big on
thirty straight weeks' booking. And--believe you me--there is a awful
lot of interesting things about a auto; only you would never suspect it
until you start to look at what is under the hood and body. As to
understanding them all, you couldn't get it all off of no twenty sheets
of yellow paper, nor twenty hundred, either! It's a career, really
understanding a machine is; just the same as being a expert dancer. The
guy that invented all them parts and got them working together certainly
must of set up nights doing it.

Well, anyways, after two hours of lapping up this dope I got so's I
could actually tell the cam shaft from the crank