_that_, don't
you?"

I am always obliged to say, "I _don't_, Ashcroft. I wish I could
understand it, but I don't. Send for the cat."

In the days which Susy is talking about, a perplexity fell to my lot one
day. F. G. Whitmore was my business agent, and he brought me out from
town in his buggy. We drove by the _porte-cochere_ and toward the
stable. Now this was a _single_ road, and was like a spoon whose handle
stretched from the gate to a great round flower-bed in the neighborhood
of the stable. At the approach to the flower-bed the road divided and
circumnavigated it, making a loop, which I have likened to the bowl of
the spoon. As we neared the loop, I saw that Whitmore was laying his
course to port, (I was sitting on the starboard side--the side the house
was on), and was going to start around that spoon-bowl on that left-hand
side. I said,

"Don't do that, Whitmore; take the right-hand side. Then I shall be next
to the house when we get to the door."

He said, "_That_ will not happen in _any case_, it doesn't make any
difference which way I go around this flower-bed."

I explained to him that he was an ass, but he stuck to his proposition,
and I said,

"Go on and try it, and see."

He went on and tried it, and sure enough he fetched me up at the door on
the very side that he had said I would be. I was not able to believe it
then, and I don't believe it yet.

I said, "Whitmore, that is merely an accident. You can't do it again."

He said he could--and he drove down into the street, fetched around,
came back, and actually did it again. I was stupefied, paralyzed,
petrified, with these strange results, but they did not convince me. I
didn't believe he could do it another time, but he did. He said he could
do it all day, and fetch up the same way every time. By that time my
temper was gone, and I asked him to go home and apply to the Asylum and
I would pay the expenses; I didn't want to see him any more for a week.

I went up-stairs in a rage and started to tell Livy about it, expecting
to get her sympathy for me and to breed aversion in her for Whitmore;
but she merely burst into peal after peal of laughter, as the tale of my
adventure went on, for her head was like Susy's: riddles and
complexities had no terrors for it. Her mind and Susy's were analytical;
I have tried to make it appear that mine was different. Many and many a
time I have told that buggy experiment, hoping against hope that I would
some