I once owned a half interest in a sick automobile. It was one of
those old-fashioned, late Victorian automobiles, cut princesse
style, with a plaquette in the back; and it looked like a cross
between a fiat-bed job press and a tailor's goose. It broke down
so easily and was towed in so often by more powerful machines that
every time a big car passed it on the road it stopped right where
it was and nickered. Of a morning we would start out in that car
filled with high hopes and bright anticipations, but eventide would
find us returning homeward close behind a bigger automobile, in a
relationship strongly suggestive of the one pictured in the
well-known Nature Group entitled: "Mother Hippo, With Young." We
refused an offer of four hundred dollars for that machine. It had
more than four hundred dollars' worth of things the matter with it.
The car we chartered at Naples for our trip to Pompeii reminded
me very strongly of that other car of which I was part owner.
Between them there was a strong family resemblance, not alone in
looks but in deportment also. For patient endurance of manifold
ills, for an inexhaustible capacity in developing new and distressing
symptoms at critical moments, for cheerful willingness to play
foal to some other car's dam, they might have been colts out of
the same litter. Nevertheless, between intervals of breaking down
and starting up again, and being helped along by friendly passer-by
automobiles, we enjoyed the ride from Naples.
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