tate my doctrine that one should not
own a motor like a horse, but rather use it like a flying dragon in the
simpler form that I will always go motoring in somebody else's car. My
favourite modern philosopher (Mr. W. W. Jacobs) describes a similar case
of spiritual delicacy misunderstood. I have not the book at hand, but
I think that Job Brown was reproaching Bill Chambers for wasteful
drunkenness, and Henery Walker spoke up for Bill, and said he scarcely
ever had a glass but what somebody else paid for it, and there was
"unpleasantness all round then."

Being less sensitive than Bill Chambers (or whoever it was) I will
risk this rude perversion of my meaning, and concede that I was in a
motor-car yesterday, and the motor-car most certainly was not my own,
and the journey, though it contained nothing that is specially unusual
on such journeys, had running through it a strain of the grotesque which
was at once wholesome and humiliating. The symbol of that influence was
that ancient symbol of the humble and humorous--a donkey.

When first I saw the donkey I saw him in the sunlight as the unearthly
gargoyle that he is. My friend had met me in his car (I repeat firmly,
in his car) at the little painted station in the middle of the warm wet
woods and hop-fields of that western country. He proposed to drive me
first to his house beyond the village before starting for a longer spin
of adventure, and we rattled through those rich green lanes which have
in them something singularly analogous to fairy tales: whether the lanes
produced the fairies or (as I believe) the fairies produced the lanes.
All around in the glimmering hop-yards stood those little hop-kilns like
stunted and slanting spires. They look like dwarfish churches--in fact,
rather like many modern churches I could mention, churches all of them
small and each of them a little crooked. In this elfin atmosphere we
swung round a sharp corner and half-way up a steep, white hill, and
saw what looked at first like a tall, black monster against the sun. It
appeared to be a dark and dreadful woman walking on wheels and waving
long ears like a bat's. A second glance told me that she was not the
local witch in a state of transition; she was only one of the million
tricks of perspective. She stood up in a small wheeled cart drawn by a
donkey; the donkey's ears were just set behind her head, and the whole
was black against the light.

Perspective is really the comic element in