ive--the
splendour of the idea of dashing up to hotels in his own automobile
dazed him. He beheld himself doing his hundred kilometres an hour and
trailing clouds of glory whithersoever he went. To a child a moth-eaten
rocking-horse is a fiery Arab of the plains; to Aristide Pujol this
cheat of the scrap-heap was a sixty-horse-power thunderer and devourer
of space.

How they managed to botch up her interior so that she moved unpushed
is a mystery which Aristide, not divining, could not reveal; and when
and where he himself learned to drive a motor-car is also vague. I
believe the knowledge came by nature. He was a fellow of many weird
accomplishments. He could conjure; he could model birds and beasts out
of breadcrumb; he could play the drum--so well that he had a kettle-drum
hanging round his neck during most of his military service; he could
make omelettes and rabbit-hutches; he could imitate any animal that ever
emitted sound--a gift that endeared him to children; he could do almost
anything you please--save stay in one place and acquire material
possessions. The fact that he had never done a thing before was to him
no proof of his inability to do it. In his superb self-confidence he
would have undertaken to conduct the orchestra at Covent Garden or
navigate a liner across the Atlantic. Knowing this, I cease to bother my
head about so small a matter as the way in which he learned to drive a
motor-car.

Behold him, then, one raw March morning, scuttering along the road that
leads from Arles to Salon, in Provence. He wore a goat-skin coat and a
goat-skin cap drawn down well over his ears. His handsome bearded face,
with its lustrous, laughing eyes, peeped out curiously human amid the
circumambient shagginess. There was not a turn visible in the long,
straight road that lost itself in the far distant mist; not a speck on
it signifying cart or creature. Aristide Pujol gave himself up to the
delirium of speed and urged the half-bursting engine to twenty miles an
hour. In spite of the racing-track surface, the crazy car bumped and
jolted; the sides of the rickety bonnet clashed like cymbals; every
valve wheezed and squealed; every nut seemed to have got loose and
terrifically clattered; rattling noises, grunting noises, screeching
noises escaped from every part; it creaked and clanked like an
over-insured tramp-steamer in a typhoon; it lurched as though afflicted
with loco-motor ataxy; and noisome vapours belched forth f