"I hope not," I sighed, pulling out a cigar and a match, as I’d always done in the buggy. It was blown out before the sulphur burned. "You can’t do that in an automobile," he yelled, "we’re going too fast. Like to stop for you, but we’re fairly humming—be there in half an hour, old man." Honk! Honk! We had turned a bend in the road. "Great Cæsar!" I shouted. "Nobody going to town! Look!" His jaws dropped. There they were. We could see for half a mile, and so help me heaven, but this was the procession that passed as we pulled out of the narrow pike on the roadside, consumed with impatience to get to the field, the machine throbbing beneath us like a loft over a barn dance: First an old sorrel mare, a worn-out buggy of the vintage of 1874, and two old ladies. The whole thing approached gingerly, creeping up like a yellow cat. It was a toss-up as to which of the two’s eyes popped the biggest, or which had her mouth shut tightest. The old mare was game, and sidled up, and just as I saw the wheels begin to form in her head the occupants threw down the lines and began to pop two pairs of country-yarned legs out of the two sides of the buggy, exclaiming, "Fur ther Lord’s sake thar, Mister, ketch ’er!" I jumped out and had her by the bits. One of them relieved herself by spitting snuff over the dashboard, while the other took it out on me, deprecating the day when "Sech folks an’ things blocks up ther public trail—an’ so help me, ain’t that thar Mister Jack, an’ my old man bred this mar’ by his say so! Jack,—Ananias," she sniffed, as she drove off. The next were right on us, two slick, three-year-old sugar-mules, hauling a load of darkies. They came on at a rattling clip, making more noise than a freight train, jollying, laughing and cackling. The men were on plank seats across the wagon, the women in high-back hickory chairs, squatting low and feeling as good as Senegambians usually do in a white man’s country, where he does all the worrying and thinking and they do all the loafing and eating. They passed us without a wabble. I expected that, for a mule, like a negro, never sees anything until he has passed it. I saw the gate of the wagon had been taken out in the rear to let the damsels in: also the chickens, the coop of ducks, a bundle of coon-skins, pumpkins, a sack of unwashed wool, some spare ribs and a tub of only such nice chitlings as a country mammy can prepare. They passed, and then the scare got into those three-year-old corn feds good by way of their tails. For I saw these straighten out first, then their ears. I saw the big driver fall back on the lines, and— "Whoa, dar!"