ery. It didn't take
long to find out what was the matter. The "aspiration pipe," Rattray
said, had worked loose (no doubt through the jolting over the Dieppe
_pave_) and the "vapour couldn't get from the carburetter to the
explosion chamber."

I only partly understood, but I felt that the poor car wasn't to blame.
How could it be expected to go on without aspirating? There was "no
spanner to fit the union," and Rattray darkly hinted at further trouble.
Three little French boys with a go-cart had come to stare. I Kodaked
them and send you their picture in this letter as a sort of punctuation
to my complaints.

Well, when Rattray had screwed up the "union" as well as he could (isn't
that what our statesmen did after the confederate war?), off we started
again, bustled through the town in the valley (which I found from Murray
was Neufchatel-en-Bray), and had a consoling run through beautiful
country until, at noon, we shot into the market-place of Forges les
Eaux. It was market-day, and we drove at a walking pace through the
crowded _place_, all alive with booths, the cackling of turkeys, and the
lowing of cows. There seemed to be only one decent inn, and the _salle
a manger_ was full of loud-talking peasants, with shrewd, brown,
wrinkled faces like masks, who "ate out loud," as I used to say.

The place was so thronged that Rattray had to sit at the same table with
us, and though as a good democrat I oughtn't to have minded, I did
squirm a little, for his manners--well, "they're better not to dwell
on." But the luncheon _was_ good, so French and so cheap. We hurried
over it, but it took Rattray half an hour to replenish the tanks of the
car with water (of course he had to lift down the luggage to do this)
and to oil the bearings. We sailed out of Forges les Eaux so bravely
that my hopes went up. It seemed certain we should be in Paris quite in
good time, but almost as soon as we had got out of the town one of the
chains glided gracefully off on to the road.

You'd think it the simplest thing in the world to slip it on again, but
that was just what it wasn't. Rattray worked over it half an hour
(everything takes half an hour to do on this car, I notice, when it
doesn't take more), saying things under his breath which Aunt Mary was
too deaf and I too dignified to hear. Finally I was driven to remark
waspishly, "You'd be a bad soldier; a good soldier makes the best of
things, and bears them like a man. You make the worst