For three miles we meandered through San Antonio’s “Cabbage Patch,” steering around tin cans, Mexican babies, and goats taking the freedom of the city, until we came to a fine broad macadam in good repair,--our first real road since the ill-fated stretch outside Houston. Mexicans hung outside their little shops, whose festoons of onions and peppers painted Italy into the landscape. Overhead, we counted dozens of airplanes, some from the government school, others from Katharine Stinson’s modest hangars, making the most of the weather. One coquetted with us, following us for several miles. We leaned out and waved, but at that, it was a most impersonal form of flirtation. Not a quiver of the great wings, not a swoop through the blue, rewarded our abandon. I wish I might record otherwise, for a moment later a rusty nail had flattened our back tire, and we were left alone on the prairie to solve the problem of changing the heavy rims, which our combined strength could hardly lift. How romantic and happy a touch could be added to this narrative if at this point I could state that the airman fluttered to our feet, saluted, changed the tire, and then circled back to the blue. But, doubtless himself from Boston, he did no such thing. He kept steadily on his course, till he was only a speck in our lives. If the cautious man reads this, let him know he is forgiven the tire, but not the climax. We had been airy, at home, when they mentioned the tires. There were, nevertheless, internal doubts. Massachusetts is too crowded with garages to furnish much practice in wayside repairing, and I had been lucky. But now came the test. Theoretically, we understood the process, but jacks go up when they should go down, nuts rust, and rims warp. We searched the horizon for help, found none, pulled out the tools, and got down in the mud. Our jack was the kind whose advertisements show an immaculate young lady in white daintily propelling a handle at arm’s length, while the car rises easily in the air. Admitting she has the patience of Job, the strength of Samson, and the ingenuity of the devil, I should like to meet her just long enough to ask her if she stood off at arm’s length while she put the jack in place, rescued it as it toppled over, searched vainly for a solid spot in which the jack would not sink, pulled it out of the mud again, pushed the car off as it rolled back on her, hunted for stones to prop it up, and a place in the axles where the arm would fit, and then had the latch give way and be obliged to do it all over again. And, with no reflections on the veracity of the lady or her inspired advertiser, I should demand the address of her pastor and her laundress.