[Illustration: "For a chaser she wore one of those feather boas."] Well, I turned the horseless gag into the shell road and cut loose. We were doing about 43 miles an hour and the birdies were singing on the way. Clarence Edgerton Montrose was working in Shaft No. 3, back in the mines--my lady friend told me so. She was having the time of her life. I was her candy boy for sure. Just then something snapped and the machine started for Portland, Maine, on the basis of a mile in eight seconds. Clara Jane grabbed me around the neck and I grabbed the lever. "The eccentric has buckled the thingamajig!" I yelled, pushing the lever over to stop the carryall. The thing gave me the horse laugh, jumped over a telegraph pole, bit its way through a barb-wire fence and then started down the road at the rate of 2,000,000 miles a minute. "Why don't you stop it?" screamed my lady friend. "I'll be the goat; what's the answer?" I said, clawing the lever and ducking the low bridges. We met a man on a bicycle and the last I saw of him as we whizzed by he had found a soft spot in a field about four blocks away and he was going into it head first. We kept his bicycle and carried it along on our smoke stack. I couldn't stop the thing to save my life. Every time I yanked the lever the snap would let a chortle out of its puzzle department and fly 400 feet straight through the air. We were headed for an old ash heap, and my market price had gone down to three cents a ton. "Don't jump!" I yelled to my lady friend, but the wind whisked the first half of my sentence away. Clara Jane gathered her skirts in a bunch and did a flying leap out of the crazy cab. She landed right in the middle of that heap of fresh ashes--and she made good. All I could see was a great, gray cloud as I pushed on to the next stand. About half a mile further down the road the machine concluded to turn into a farm-yard and give the home folks a treat. It went through a window in the barn, out through a skylight, did the hula dance over the lawn, and then fell in the well and stayed there, panting as though its little gas-engine heart would break. When I limped back to Clara Jane the storm signals were flying. She was away out on the ice. The feather boa looked like the hawser on a canal boat, and the ashes had changed the pattern of her dress goods. We were stingy talkers on the road home. It will take me two years to square myself. Hereafter, me to the trolley! Me to the saucy stage coach when I'm due to gallop away and away! No more benzine buggies for yours sincerely! Never again for the bughouse barouche! Not me. I have only one consolation: The chap we pried off the bicycle was Clarence Edgerton Montrose. It will take him about three years and two months to find all the spots that foolish-wagon knocked off him. Meantime, I hope to be Clara Jane's sugar buyer again. JOHN HENRY AT THE MUSICALE. Did you ever get ready and go to a _musicale_?