e end of the rules we had thought of, when
things began to happen. The road, which had been splendid all the way to
Asti and beyond, seemed suddenly to weary of virtue and turn eagerly to
vice. It grew rutty and rough-tempered, and just because misfortunes
never come singly, every creature we met took it into its head to regard
us with horror. Fear of us spread like an epidemic through the animal
kingdom of the neighbourhood. A horse drawing a wagon-load of earth
turned tail, broke his harness as if it had been of cobweb instead of
old rope, and sprang lightly as a gazelle with all four feet into
another wagon just ahead. A donkey, ambling gently along the road,
suddenly made for the opposite side, dragging his fruit-laden cart after
him, and smashed our big acetylene lamp into a brass pancake before Mr.
Barrymore could stop. Children bawled; women, old and young, ran
screaming up embankments and tried to climb walls at the bare sight of
us in the distance; old men shook their sticks; and for a climax we
plunged deep into a tossing sea of cattle just outside Alessandria.

It was market day, the Chauffeulier explained hastily, over his
shoulder, and the farmers and dealers who had bought creatures of any
sort, were taking them away. As far as we could see through a floating
cloud of dust, the long road looked like a picture of the animals'
procession on their way to the ark. Our automobile might have stood for
the ark, only it is to be hoped, for Noah's sake, after all he was doing
for them, that the creatures behaved less rudely at sight of it, novelty
though it must have been.

Great white, classic-looking oxen whose horns ought to have been
wreathed with roses, but weren't, pawed the air, bellowing, or pranced
down into ditches, pulling their new masters with them. Calves ran here
and there like rabbits, while their mothers stood on their hind legs and
pirouetted, their biscuit-coloured faces haggard with despair.

Mamma said that never before had she given cows credit for such
sensitive spirits, but perhaps it was only Italian ones which were like
that, and if so she would not drink milk in Italy. She was very much
frightened, too; and talking of an automobile supplying bumps, her grip
on Sir Ralph's arm must have supplied a regular pattern of bruises,
during the animal episode.

But worse than the terrified beasts were the ones that were not
terrified. Those were the most stupidly stolid things on earth, or the