Main Street," snorts
Pelty. "You cranked that thing long enough to grind it home by hand."

"Ya-a! Talk, will you?" yells Chet earnestly. "Any man who begins
carrying hot water out to his machine in a teakettle in September knows
a lot about starting cars."

"Well, get down to business," says Pelty. "You want to trade, you say.
I don't want that mess. It's an old back-number with tin springs, glass
gears and about as much compression as a bandbox. Give me five hundred
dollars and throw your automobile in. I need something to tie my cow to.
She'd haul away anything that was movable."

"Give you five hundred dollars for that parody on a popcorn wagon?"
snorts Chet. "Why, man, the poor old thing has to go into low to pull
its shadow! You're delirious, Pelty. I'll tell you what I'll do. You
give me a thousand dollars for my car, and I'll agree to haul that old
calliope up to my barn, out of your way, and make a hen roost out of it.
Come on now. It's your only chance."

Shortly after this they are parted by anxious friends, and the show is
over. I've known Homeburg men to give up a trip to Chicago because Chet
and Pelty began to trade their autos just before train time.

In New York an auto means comfort and pleasure and advertisement, like a
fur-lined overcoat with a Persian lamb collar. But in Homeburg it means
a lot more. It keeps us busy and happy and full of conversation and
debate. It pulls our old, retired farmers out of their shells and makes
them yell for improvements. It unbuckles our tight-wads and gives our
ingenious young loafers something to do. It promotes town pride, and it
keeps our money circulating so fast that every one has a chance to grasp
a chunk as it goes by.

It has made us so independent of railroads that we feel now when buying
a ticket to Chicago as if we were helping the poor old line out. Our
Creamery has been collecting milk and shipping butter in an old roadster
with a wagon bed thorax for a year. Two of our rural route mail carriers
use small machines, except in wet weather, and good-roads societies in
our vicinity are the latest fad. We raised one thousand five hundred
dollars last spring to bring the Cannon Ball Trail from Chicago to
Kansas City through our town, and our hotel-keeper contributed one
hundred dollars of it. He says we'll be on the gas-line tourist route to
the coast after the trail has been marked and drained and graded up
well.

But mostly the automobile means freed