evel and unprotected by traffic lights. Neat unattractive
clusters of mass-built houses interspersed with occasional clumps of
woodland had been replaced with long stretches of pine woods, only
occasionally relieved by houses and barns of obviously antique
manufacture. Some of these looked disturbingly familiar.

And the roadside signs--all at once they were everywhere. Here a
weathered but still-legible little Burma-Shave series, a wooden
Horlick's contented cow, Socony, That Good Gulf Gasoline, the black
cat-face bespeaking Catspaw Rubber Heels. Here were the coal-black Gold
Dust twins, Kelly Springfield's Lotta Miles peering through a large
rubber tire, a cocked-hatted boniface advertising New York's Prince
George Hotel, the sleepy Fisk Tire boy in his pajamas and carrying a
candle.

And then a huge opened book with a quill pen stuck in an inkwell
alongside. On the right-hand page it said, _United States Tires Are Good
Tires_ and on the left, _You are 3-1/2 miles from Lincolnville. In 1778
General O'Hara, leading a British raiding party inland, was ambushed on
this spot by Colonel Amos Coulter and his militia and forced to retreat
with heavy loss._

Slowing down because the high-crowned road was slippery with sun-melted
ice, Coulter noted that the steering wheel responded heavily. Then he
saw suddenly that it was smaller than he'd remembered and made of black
rubber instead of the almond-hued plastic of his new convertible. And
his light costly fabric gloves had become black leather, lined with fur!

A gong rang in his memory. He had driven this road many times in years
gone by, he had known all these signs as quasi-landmarks, he had worn
such gloves one winter. There had been a little triangular tear in the
heel of the left one, where he had snagged it on a nail sticking out of
the garage wall. But that had been many years ago....

He looked and found the tear and felt cold sweat bathe his body under
his clothes. And he was suddenly, mightily, afraid....

He hit another bump and this time the springs did not take up the shock.
He felt briefly like a rodeo cowboy riding a bucking mustang. The car in
which he rode had changed. It was no longer the sleek convertible of the
mid-1950's. It was his old Pontiac sedan, the car he had driven for two
years before leaving Lincolnville behind him twenty years ago!

Nor was he wearing the dark-blue vicuna topcoat he had reclaimed an hour
before from the checkroom girl in