ky, a
faint silver light pulsed and quivered, like the water-lights that one
sees on the wall of a room near the river. It was a search-light sent out
by the moon, which was _en panne_ somewhere on its way up the horizon,
Maida said; and it was she who put some of those other thoughts into my
mind; but my head didn't hold any of them long at that time, because of
the next thing that happened.

It was not a view; it was a plunge that we took down into the view.

We had come up one side of a house to get to this place on the roof, and
now we began to slither down the other side, which was worse, a hundred
times worse.

Who was it who said, "A horse, my kingdom for a horse?" I think it must
have been Richard the Third in Shakspere's play, which I went to see
once in Denver, at a matinee, and Mr. Kidder scolded me afterwards for
wasting my time and his money. Well, I never sympathized with any one so
much in life as I sympathized with that poor man (I mean Richard, not
Mr. Kidder) at this moment. I knew just how he must have felt, though of
course the circumstances were somewhat different, automobiles not having
been invented in those days, and he being on the stage, with a battle
going on behind the scenes, where it was cheaper to produce, I suppose.

But I would have given my money, and even my title, for a kind, gentle
horse (the older the better) instead of a motor-car. A horse, at his
worst, doesn't want to kill himself, while an automobile doesn't care
what happens to it; and in these dreadful moments the only possible
comfort would have been in sitting behind a thing with an instinct of
self-preservation.

As it was, I sat with every muscle tense and a feeling as if my hair was
standing up so straight on my head that every hairpin must fall out. But
what was a hairpin more or less, or even a "transformation" a little
awry, to a woman about to become a corpse? I held my breath, as if to
let it go meant to lose it forever, while that automobile walked down
the mountain exactly as a fly walks down a long expanse of wall-paper,
making a short turn for every flower in the pattern.

There was a flower every other second in _our_ pattern, which meant a
sharp turn for the fly; and I could have slapped Mr. Barrymore for
talking on, as if we weren't in peril enough to be prayed for in church,
about the Lake of Como and the Lake of Lecco, and Bellagio (where we
were going) on the promontory. Where we were going, indeed! O