Let this chapter close with the last unhappy episode in a supremely happy tour, with which episode it would be discordant to mix the undiluted pleasure of the next chapter. We started, for us, rather early; that is to say we breakfasted at half-past seven and left the hotel door slightly after eight. All down the zigzag hill into the town the machinery said nothing at all. There was no reason why it should make any demonstration, since it had no work to do. Once called upon to work, however, the car soon began to crackle and to splutter again. There was no room for doubt what was the matter. Foreign matter had found its way into the petrol tank and beyond; and it was hard stuff, genuine grit, undissolved by a night's soaking. Whether the ostler at the "Maid's Head" or he of Bury St. Edmunds was to blame, and in justice to the former it must be said that it might have been either, the nuisance was beyond question. It was Sunday morning, too; it was hardly likely that the repair shops would be of any assistance, at any rate so early in the morning, and, empty as the streets were then, it would not have been seemly to begin in them, at about the hour of the earliest service, an operation which might very likely consume an hour or more. So up the hill on the far side of the town we crawled--for Cromer lies in the hollow of a cup--snorting and grunting not a little, in sickly fashion and with much trouble, as the Latin exercises used to put it, and out on to the sandy road, leading between sandy and wind-swept fields, towards Runton. There, thanking our stars that few wayfarers were astir, we stopped, and Mr. Johnson, cheerfully remarking that those who could be of no help, because there is only room for one big man face upwards under a car, had better go for a little walk and see some of the country, addressed himself with a smile and a half-groan to his odious task with its infinite possibilities in the way of black and viscous lubricant dropping into his hair or on to his face. In this posture I left him, his legs alone visible, for a little tour of inspection; but there was no temptation to prolong it.