There attended it, besides the driver of the lorry, a straggling retinue of half-a-dozen men on foot--handy-looking mechanics, very dusty. I should have liked to question one or another of these as to their mission. But I was afraid to do so. There is an art of talking acceptably to people who do not regard themselves as members of one’s own class; and I have never acquired it. I suppose the first step is to forget that any art is needed-to forget that one must not be so wildly cordial for fear of seeming to ‘condescend,’ nor be more than a trifle saturnine, either, for the same motive. Or am I wrong? The whole thing is a mystery to me. All I know is that if I had asked those mechanics what they were doing with that railway car they would have seemed to suspect me of meaning that it was my property and that they had stolen it. Or perhaps they would have seemed merely to resent my idle curiosity. If so, why not? When I walk abroad with a sheaf of manuscript in my hand, mechanics do not stop me to ask ‘What’s that? What’s it about? Who’s going to publish it?’ Nor is this because, times having changed so, they are afraid of seeming to condescend. They always did mind their own business. And now that their own business is so much more lucrative than mine they still follow that golden rule. I stood gazing back at the procession till it disappeared round a bend of the road. Its bequest of dust and smoke was quickly spent by a prodigal young breeze. Landscape and seascape were reindued with their full amenities. Ruskin would have been pleased. So indeed was I; but that railway-car (in which, it romantically struck me, I myself might once, might frequently, have travelled) was still upmost in my brooding mind. To what manner of wretched end was it destined? No end would have seemed bad enough for it to Ruskin. But I was born late enough to acquiesce in railways and in all that pertains to them. And now, since the success of motor-cars (those far greater, because unrestricted, bores), railways have taken on for me some such charm as the memory of the posting coaches had for the greybeards of my boyhood, some such charm as aeroplanes may in the fulness of time foist down for us on motor-cars. ‘But I rove,’ like Sir Thomas More. And I seem to think that a cheap literary allusion will make you excuse that vice. To resume my breathless narrative I decided that I would slowly follow the tracks of the lorry.