Now and again he startles you with the legerdemain feat of snatching brand-new ideas out of the blue, like rabbits out of a hat. While you stand at the port-hole of your cabin and watch the rollers rushing back to the beloved home-land you are quitting, he marshals your friends and acquaintances into a long line for a word of greeting or a rapid-fire chat, just as though you were some idol of the people, and were steaming past the Statue of Liberty on your way home from lion-slaughter in Africa, and the Auto-comrade were the factotum at your elbow who asks, “What name, please?” After the friends and acquaintances, he even brings up your _bêtes noires_ and dearest enemies for inspection and comment. Strangely enough, viewed in this way, these persons no longer seem so contemptible or pernicious or devilish as they once did. At this point your factotum rubs your eye-glasses bright with the handkerchief he always carries about for slate-cleaning purposes, and, lo! you even begin to discover hitherto unsuspected good points about the chaps. Then there are always your million and one favorite melodies which nobody but that all-around musical amateur, the Auto-comrade, can so exquisitely whistle, hum, strum, fiddle, blat, or roar. There is also a universeful of new ones for him to improvise. And he is the jolliest sort of fellow-musician, because, when you play or sing a duet with him, you can combine with the exciting give-and-take and reciprocal stimulation of the duet the godlike autocracy of the solo, with its opportunity for uninterrupted, uncoerced, wide self-expression. Sometimes, however, in the first flush of escape with him to the wilds, you are fain to clap your hand over his mouth in order the better to taste the essentially folkless savor of solitude. For music is a curiously social art, and Browning was right when he said, “Who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once.” Perhaps you can find your entertainer a small lump of clay or modeling-wax to thumb into bad caricatures of those you love and good ones of those you hate, until increasing facility impels him to try and model not a Tanagra figurine, for that would be unlike his original fancy, but a Hoboken figurine, say, or a sketch for some Elgin (Illinois) marbles.