It was easy to imagine myself the partner in magnificent risks quite outside my own experience, and to feel the glory and even the danger with no touch of pain, whilst I lay as careless as the friendly near neighbourhood of sleep could make me. The touch of arrogance in the voice of the motor is to its credit by night. In a measure it revives the romantic and accepted arrogance of horn and trumpet. It gives at least an outward bravery which has long been dropping away from drivers of horses. I do not disparage the sound of hoofs and wheels and the private voice of a solitary traveller on the dark roads, but there is something melancholy in it, and more endurance than enterprise.... But, above all, the sounds of the motor-car have added immensely to the London night, at least for good sleepers with minds at ease. Formerly, to those out of the Covent Garden routes, the only sound of night travel at all provoking to the mind was the after-midnight hansom’s clatter, which challenged conjecture more often than imagination; I pictured most likely a man with bleared eyes and a white shirt who had let his cigar out--at most, a man whose achievement was behind rather than before him; and certainly I was always very well content to be in bed. But the motor-horn is turbulent and daring, though it may be innocent to say so. Even if it is coming home there is a proud possibility of distance left behind, and either it seems that the arrivers have not returned for nothing or the sudden stop suggests at the least a sublimity of dejection from proud heights. As to the car setting out in darkness, it gathers to itself all the pomp of setting out, as we have imagined or read of it in stories of soldiers, travellers or lovers, and as we have experienced it when children, going to fish or to find bird’s nests or mushrooms, and as we still fancy it would be for ourselves, were we ever to advance towards adventures. I suppose, also, that the speed of a motor-car, to the outsider, unconsciously suggests a race, an unknown end, an untold prize.... These thoughts and mere listening to the horns and machinery occupied me and led on to sleep in such a manner that I ignored a man next door imitating a gramophone quite seriously, and in less than half an hour I was asleep and began to dream drivel. CHAPTER IV SECOND DAY--NEWMARKET TO ODSEY, BY ICKLETON AND ROYSTON