“Would it not be better to repair it immediately?” “No, I prefer to go on. When one stops one never knows when one will be able to set out again. There will always be time to....” “Perhaps it will warm up again,” but the hooter drowned my hesitating voice with a great clamor, and my fingers clutched hold of the steering-wheel, for when this clamor had died down, it turned to a continuous note which took on rhythm and inflections, and I felt coming through this cadence an air--a marching tune (after all, it was perhaps I who made myself hear it). This air drew nearer, so to say, became more defined, and after some halting attempts like those of a singer trying his voice, the car resolutely thundered out with its copper throat, “_Rum fil dum, fil dum._” At the accent of the German’s songs, a horde of suspicions swooped on my uneasy mind. I had an intuition that something fantastic, mysterious, monstrous, had happened. I tried cutting off the petrol. The handle resisted. The brake resisted. A superior force kept them immovable. Losing my head altogether, I let go the steering-wheel, and took two arms to the diabolical brake. The same result, but the hooter made a gargling sound, and then was silent. The girl exclaimed angrily, “That’s a funny trumpet!” As for me, I had no desire to laugh. My ideas began to follow one another in a giddy whirl, and my Reason refused to sanction my reasoning. This metallic car, from which wood, india rubber and leather had been banished--of which no fragment belong to matter at one time alive, was it not an _organized body which had never lived_? This automatic mechanism--was it not a body _capable of reflexes, but a body devoid of intelligence_? Was it not in fact--according to the note-book--a possible receptacle of a soul in its totality,--that receptacle which the Professor in his haste had declared to be non-existent? At the moment of his apparent death, Klotz-Lerne had doubtless indulged in an experiment on the car, recalling that of the poplar tree, but having been absent-minded for some weeks, perhaps he had not foreseen (fatal want of logic), that his soul would slip entirely into that empty receptacle, and that the “attachment” being broken, his human form would be no more than a corpse, into which the laws of his own discovery forbade him to return. Or else, perhaps, weary with pursuing the fortune he could not seize, Klotz-Lerne had acted of his own free will, and committed a sort of suicide, by exchanging the substance of my uncle for that of a machine. But why should he not have wished, simply and solely, to become the new beast, foretold by him in a moment of eccentricity--the animal of the future--the ruler of creation, which the re-fitting of its organs was to make immortal and infinitely perfectible, according to his lunatical prophecy?