II.

"If you turn that handle sharply to the left, she'll start," said the Doctor.

"And if you turn that magneto switch sharply to the right, she'll start even better," said I.

It was a perfect afternoon, and we went spinning along one of the roads that had the good sense to lead out of Rome. What all the roads do when they get to Rome, except become very dirty, has always puzzled me.

The Doctor had quitted the crooked ways of the tort, and was now prancing like an unbroken colt in the misty and guttural realms of the German language.

"I know not what is the meaning
Of all my sorrow and tears."

he recited in German; at least I presumed that the language in which he recited had once been distinctly connected by marriage with German. Whenever the page 38 Doctor tells me he is going to recite something in German, I know in advance that he is going to ponder on the meaning of his sorrow and tears. His repertoire is as yet confined to them.

"I'll tell you, if you ask me nicely," I said on this occasion. They mean that your egg was cold this morning, and you can't think of the past tense of those strong and active German verbs."

"Do you call those verbs active," he replied. "Why, they do nothing but loaf about and wait for the end of the sentence to come their way. Then they hook on casually and you stumble across them when you're dead tired. Those lively little English devils would knock spots out of them any day."

"Perhaps so, but wait till you meet their irregulars. The Pluperfect Conditional Subjunctive is a rare old fighter."

That quietened him down considerabley, and all went right till a tyre went wrong. The Doctor called it a "blow-out."

"So that," I said, selecting the newest Railway Time-table from a pocket of the car, "is a blow-out. I hope to buy a car myself one of these days, and I shall certainly order two or three spare blow-outs."

"Lend a hand there" came from somewhere in the rear of the car.

"Never," I said. "Both my feet, my epiglottis and my vermiform appendix are yours to do with as you pleas; but my hand never. It is already given to another. And I think these seats of yours need re-upholstering, and the cigarettes you keep in here are rotten."

A great clanking as of chains came from underneath the car.

"A tort is a civil wrong" I whispered softly to myself. And then I laughed. It was a nasty laugh, and from the key in which it was pitched the Doctor could tell that it was not at any joke of his.