After you have become acquainted, do not risk the friendship by letting the capricious thing out of your sight.
It is so fickle that it forms wanton attachments for every one it meets,--for urchins, idlers, loafers, mechanics, permits them all sorts of familiarities, so that when, like a truant, it comes wandering back, it is no longer the same, but a new creature, which you must learn again to know.
It is monotonously lonesome running an automobile across country alone; the record-breaker may enjoy it, but the civilized man does not; man is a gregarious animal, especially in his sports; one must have an audience, if an audience of only one.
The return of the Professor made it necessary to find some one else.

There was but one who could go, but she had most emphatically refused; did not care for the dust and dirt, did not care for the curious crowds, did not care to go fast, did not care to go at all.

To overcome these apparently insurmountable objections, a semi-binding pledge was made to not run more than ten or twelve miles per hour, and not more than thirty or forty miles per day,--promises so obviously impossible of fulfillment on the part of any chauffeur that they were not binding in law.

We started out well within bounds, making but little over forty miles the first day; we wound up with a glorious run of one hundred and forty miles the last day, covering the Old Sarnia gravel out of London, Ontario, at top speed for nearly seventy miles.
For five weeks to a day we wandered over the eastern country at our own sweet will, not a care, not a responsibility,--days without seeing newspapers, finding mail and telegrams at infrequent intervals, but much of the time lost to the world of friends and acquaintances.
Touring on an automobile differs from coaching, posting, railroading, from every known means of locomotion, in that you are really lost to the world.

In coaching or posting, one knows with reasonable certainty the places that can be made; the itinerary is laid out in advance, and if departed from, friends can be notified by wire, so that letters and telegrams may be forwarded.
With an automobile all is different.