age
records don't tell us anything. There's Wilcox, the telegraph operator.
He makes seventy-five dollars a month. He works nights to earn it, and
he spends his days driving around the country in his runabout. He's
thirty years old, and I think he invested in an auto instead of a wife.

You can get a good meal in our local restaurant for twenty-five cents,
and when some painstaking plutocrat comes in and tries to spend a dollar
there, he has to be removed by kindly hands in a state of fatal
distension before the job is finished. A thousand dollars would buy
stock, fixtures, and good will. But a thousand wouldn't buy the
restaurant owner's automobile. He began with two hundred and fifty
dollars' worth of rubbish and a monkey wrench four years ago, and has
pottered and tinkered and traded and progressed until he now owns a last
year's model, staggering under labor-saving devices.

Our oculist, who does business in a tiny corner in a shoe-store and
never overcharged any one in his life, was our pioneer automobile owner.
He bought a homemade machine and a mule at the same time, and by
judiciously combining the two he got a good deal of mileage out of both.
He would work all morning getting the automobile down-town and all
afternoon getting the mule to haul it back. He has had three machines
since then, and the one he owns now is only third-hand.

For years Mrs. Strawn washed clothes for the town from morning till
night, two washings a day and all garments returned intact. Her boys
used to call at our house for the wash with a wheelbarrow. They come in
an automobile now. She bought it. It was a hopeless invalid at the time,
but they nursed it back to health, and I hear that next spring they are
going to trade it in for a new machine.... Why do I say machine? Because
that's what an automobile is out our way. It's a machine, and we treat
it as such. Most of our people couldn't take a lobster to pieces to save
their lives, but you ought to see them go through the shell of an auto.
Too many Americans buy portable parlors with sixty-seven coats of
varnish, and are then shocked and grieved to discover when too late that
said parlors have gizzards just like any other automobile and that they
should have been looked after.

I said there were one hundred automobiles in Homeburg. I was mistaken.
There are ninety-nine automobiles and one car. The Payleys own the car.
They bought it in New York, paid six thousand dollars for it, with