Glancing up casually from the roar and rumble of his abruptly repentant engine the Senior Surgeon swore once more under his breath to think that any female sitting perfectly idle and non-concerned in a seven thousand dollar car should have the nerve to flaunt such a furiously strenuous color. Bristling with resentment and mink furs he strode around the fender and stumbled with increasing irritation across the White Linen Nurse's knees to his seat. Just for an instant his famous fingers seemed to flash with apparent inconsequence towards one bit of mechanism and another. Then like a huge, portentous pill floated on smoothest syrup the car slid down the yawning street into the congested city. Altogether monotonously in terms of pain and dirt and drug and disease the city wafted itself in and out of the White Linen Nurse's well-grooved consciousness. From every filthy street corner sodden age or starved babyhood reached out its fluttering pulse to her. Then, suddenly sweet as a draught through a fever-tainted room, the squalid city freshened into jocund, luxuriant suburbs with rollicking tennis courts, and flaming yellow forsythia blossoms, and green velvet lawns prematurely posied with pale exotic hyacinths and great scarlet splotches of lusty tulips. Beyond this hectic horticultural outburst the leisurely Spring faded out again into April's naturally sallow colors. Glossy and black as an endless typewriter ribbon, the narrow, tense State Road seemed to wind itself everlastingly in--and in--and in--on some hidden spool of the car's mysterious mechanism. Clickety-Click-Click-Clack,--faster than any human mind could think,--faster than any human hand could finger,--hurtling up hazardous hills of thought,--sliding down facile valleys of fancy,--roaring with emphasis,--shrieking with punctuation,--the great car yielded itself perforce to Fate's dictation. Robbed successively of the city's humanitarian pang, of the suburb's esthetic pleasure, the White Linen Nurse found herself precipitated suddenly into a mere blur of sight, a mere chaos of sound. In whizzing speed and crashing breeze,--houses--fences--meadows--people--slapped across her eyeballs like pictures on a fan. On and on and on through kaleidoscopic yellows and rushing grays the great car sped, a purely mechanical factor in a purely mechanical landscape. Rigid with concentration the Senior Surgeon stared like a dead man into the intrepid, on-coming road. Intermittently from her green, plushy laprobes the little crippled girl struggled to her feet, and sprawling clumsily across whose-ever shoulder suited her best, raised a brazenly innocent voice, deliberately flatted, in a shrill and maddeningly repetitive chant of her own making, to the effect that All the birds were there With yellow feathers instead of hair, And bumble bees crocheted in the trees-- And bumble bees crocheted in the trees-- And all the birds were there-- And--And--