“Oh, no; that would have been too foolhardy. But when I saw it was making off I didn't want it--I mean _him_--to go careering and cavorting about the country alone, so I climbed up and tried to take command. You showed me how to use the reversing-lever, and it all seemed easy when you were here, but when I was alone I didn't dare touch it for fear something disastrous would happen. All I ventured to do was to take the wheel and keep, him in the road--or rather try to do so, for I didn't succeed very well. My strength was not equal to it. He swerved a little and then got to going more and more on the bias, until at last, despite all I could do to the contrary, he ran off against a tree and was obliged to stop. Soon afterward that hissing noise began, and, fearing an explosion, I ran and got behind the wall on the other side of the street, and then--then you came. I don't think I ever was more rejoiced to see anybody in all my life.” I resisted a temptation to make a speech, which, however much in earnest I was, might have sounded silly, and contented myself with remarking that I was glad to have arrived in such good time, and I turned my attention to the taking of her--and Antaeus--safe home. I could not get to sleep after going to bed that night. The evening's experience of itself was hardly a soporific, but there was yet another matter to occupy my thoughts and prevent my sleeping. Should I venture at the next favorable opportunity to put a certain question to a certain person? If I did so what answer should I receive? I hoped and I feared and I doubted concerning the sentiments of the said certain person toward my unworthy self. I revolved the thing in my mind until there seemed to be little else there but revolution. Progress in any direction, certainly there was none. My body was hardly less restless than my mind. At three o'clock it flashed across me like a revelation, that I was hungry. I had eaten a light supper hours ago, and now my stomach was eloquent with emptiness; while the blood which should be doing good service there was pulsing madly about in my brain to no purpose. I went down stairs and inspected the contents of the ice-chest. Roast pork and brown bread make rather a hearty late supper, but breakfast time was so near I thought I would risk them--and a good deal of them. Returning to my room, I set a lamp upon a stand at the head of the bed and, taking the first book that came to hand--it chanced to be an Italian grammar--I began to read. I had gone as far in the introduction as “CC like t-ch in hatchet,” when I grew drowsy. I laid down the book, my eyelids drooped, and there is good circumstantial evidence that a moment later I fell asleep, lying on my back with the upper half of my body bent into the form of a bow.