I began to wonder dimly whether Maud's wind and my water and gasolene would carry us to the Hub, and, if so, what would happen when we had passed through the city. Just beyond Boston, you know, is the Atlantic Ocean. At this point in my meditations we started down the slope to the big creamery. The building is located to the right of the road. On the left, a rather steep grassy embankment drops perhaps thirty feet to the little river. On this beautiful sunny afternoon, the creamery's milk cans, something like a hundred in number, were airing by the roadside, just on the edge of the embankment; and as we thundered down I smiled grimly to think of the attractive little frill Maud might add to her performance by kicking a dozen or two of the milk cans into the river as she passed. Maud, however, as she approached the cans, kept fairly in the middle of the road--and stopped! Heavens! She stopped so short that I gasped for breath. All in a twinkling the steel rods dropped into position beside her legs, the cuffs snapped, and the Hawkins Horse-brake had worked at last! Poor old Maud! She slid a few yards with rigid limbs, squealing in terror, and then crashed to the ground like an overturned toy horse. Hawkins shot off into space, and at the moment I didn't care greatly where he landed. I was vaguely conscious that he collided head-on with the row of milk-cans, but my main anxiety was to shut off my power, set the brake, point the auto into the ditch, and jump. And I did it all in about one second. After the jump, my recollection grows hazy. I know that one of my feet landed in an open milk-can, and that I grabbed wildly at several others. Then the cans and I toppled headlong over the embankment and went down, down, down, while, fainter and fainter, I could hear something like: “Whoa! Whoa! Gol darn ye! Ow! Stop that hoss! Bang! Rattle! Rattle! Bang! Whoa! Stop, can't ye?” Then a peculiarly unyielding milk-can landed on my head and I seemed to float away. I have reason to believe that I sat up about two minutes later. The crash was over and peace had settled once more upon the face of nature. From far away came the sound of galloping hoofs, belonging, no doubt, to some of the horses who had participated in the late excitement. The embankment was strewn with men and milk-cans, chiefly the latter. No one seemed to be wholly dead, although one or two looked pretty near it. A few feet away, Burkett, the constable, was having a convulsion in his vain endeavour to extricate his cranium from a milk-can. The sounds that issued from that can made me blush. Jackson was sitting up and staring dully at the river, while Dr. Brotherton, with his frock-coat split to the collar, was fishing fragments of his medicine case out of another can. Others of the erstwhile procession were distributed about the embankment in various conditions, but, as I have said, nobody seemed to have parted company with the vital spark.