arking plug from a fly-wheel.

Most motor enthusiasts read all the important journals devoted to the
game. The old-stager reads them for their hints and suggestions,--
though these are bewildering in their multiplicity and their
contradictions,--and the ladies of the household look at them for the
sake of their pretty pictures of scenery and ladies and veils and
furry garments pertaining to the sport.

Catalogues are another bane of the motorist's life. He may have just
become possessed of the latest thing in a Mercedes (and paid an
enhanced price for an early delivery), yet upon seeing some new make
of car advertised, he will immediately send for a catalogue and
prospectus, and make the most absurd inquiries as to what said car
will or will not do.

[Illustration: Types of Cars]

Since the pleasures of motoring have found their champions in
Kipling, Maeterlinck, and the late W. E. Henley, the delectable
amusement has, besides entering the daily life of most of us,
generously permeated literature--real literature as distinct from
recent popular fiction; "The Lighting Conductor" and "The Princess
Passes," by Mrs. Williamson, and more lately, "The Motor Pirate," by
Mr. Paternoster. "A Motor Car Divorce" is the suggestive title of
another work,--presumably fiction,--and one knows not where it may
end, since "The Happy Motorist," a series of essays, is already
announced.

A Drury Lane melodrama of a season or two ago gave us a "_thrillin'
hair-bre'dth 'scape_," wherein an automobile plunged precipitately--
with an all too-true realism, the first night--down a lath and canvas
ravine, finally saving the heroine from the double-dyed villain who
followed so closely in her wake.

The last entry into other spheres was during the autumn just past,
when Paris's luxurious opera-house was given over to the fantastic
revels of the ballet in an attempt to typify the _apotheosis of the
automobile_. This was rather a rash venture in prognostication, for
it may be easy enough to "apotheosize" the horse, but to what idyllic
heights the automobile is destined to ultimately reach no one really
knows.

The average scoffer at things automobilistic is not very sincerely a
scoffer at heart. It is mostly a case of "sour grapes," and he only
waits the propitious combination of circumstances which shall permit
him to become a possessor of a motor-car himself. This is not a very
difficult procedure. It simply means that he must give up som