was placed in the sleigh, he jumped in, caught up the
reins, the chestnut reared, and off they dashed, with a deafening jingle
of the sleigh-bells. Their way lay along the main street, a broad,
bustling thoroughfare.

"Is this the sort of horse they usually have here?" asked Frederick. "The
beast is positively running away. If we come out of this crowded street
without broken limbs, it will be God's doing, not mine."

"Let him have his way. Every day there are one or more runaways here.
What's the difference if it's our turn to-day?"

But Frederick reined the horse in so tightly, that he actually succeeded
in pulling him up just as the Boston-New York express thundered by on a
line of railroad tracks crossing the street not safeguarded by gates or
fence. Frederick wondered how it was that a multitude of children,
workmen, gentlemen in high hats, ladies in silk dresses, horses, dogs,
trucks, and carriages were not mangled to a pulp and dashed against the
walls of the houses lining the tracks. The horse plunged and reared and
shot forward over the rails behind the last coach, sending clods of ice
and snow flying in Frederick's and Peter's faces.

"The devil!" snorted Frederick. "Now for the first time I observe that
form of madness which is specifically American. If you fall under the
wheels, you fall under the wheels. If you want to take a drive, be your
own coachman. If you break your bones, you break your bones. If you break
your neck, you break your neck."

Farther along on the same highway Frederick for the first time saw an
electric street car, then still unknown in Europe. The brilliant sparking
at the meeting of the trolley and the overhead wire was to him a new,
stimulating phenomenon. The posts holding up the wire were all shapes,
thick and slender, bowed and slanting, so that the whole made a
promiscuous impression, though the coaches were of a pleasing shape and
glided along with great rapidity.

They had passed the more frequented and dangerous section of the city
without an accident and had reached the open country. The houses grew
lower and farther apart. Before the chestnut with his jingling bells lay
an endless stretch of unblocked roadway, with excellent tracks for the
sleigh worn into the snow. The valiant American could speed to his
heart's content.

"How strange!" thought Frederick. "Here I am riding in a sleigh and
driving a horse, things I have not done since I was a boy."

Stories of spor