world,--the famous Perry's
Pike.

All day long we lived in anticipation of the treat to come; at
each steep hill and when struggling in the sand we mentioned
Perry's Pike as the promised land. When we viewed it, we felt with
Moses that the sight was sufficient.

In its day it must have been one of the wonders of the West, it is
so wide and straight. In the centre is a broad, perfectly flat,
raised strip of half-broken limestone. The reckless sumptuousness
of such a highway in early days must have been overpowering, but
with time and weather this strip of stone has worn into an
infinite number of little ruts and hollows, with stones the size
of cocoanuts sticking up everywhere. A trolley-line along one side
of this central stretch has not improved matters.

Perry's Pike is so bad people will not use it; a road alongside
the fence has been made by travel, and in dry weather this road is
good, barring the pipes which cross it from oil-wells, and the
many stone culverts, at each of which it is necessary to swing up
on to the pike. The turns from the side road on to the pike at
these culverts are pretty sharp, and in swinging up one, while
going at about twenty-five miles an hour, we narrowly escaped
going over the low stone wall into the ditch below. On that and
one other occasion the Professor took a firmer hold of the side of
the machine, but, be it said to the credit of learning, at no time
did he utter an exclamation, or show the slightest sign of losing
his head and jumping--as he afterwards remarked, "What's the use?"

To any one by the roadside the danger of a smash-up seems to come
and pass in an instant,--not so to the person driving the machine;
to him the danger is perceptible a very appreciable length of time
before the critical point is reached.

The secret of good driving lies in this early and complete
appreciation of difficulties and dangers encountered. "Blind
recklessness" is a most expressive phrase; it means all the words
indicate, and is contra-distinguished from open-eyed or wise
recklessness.

The timid man is never reckless, the wise man frequently is, the
fool always; the recklessness of the last is blind; if he gets
through all right he is lucky.

It is reckless to race sixty miles an hour over a highway; but the
man who does it with his eyes wide open, with a perfect
appreciation of all the dangers, is, in reality, less reckless
than the man who blindly runs his machine, hit or miss, a