ANTAEUS, By Frank M. Bicknell
ATE one night, after having been a week out of town, I was returning home by a short cut across fields, when, on coming upon the street again, I found my path barred by a huge, hulking fellow, whose unexpected appearance startled me not a little. This was my introduction to Antaeus, whose better acquaintance I was to make later under rather peculiar circumstances. Antaeus was not a highway robber, but a highway roller, and when he first confronted me he was drawn up beside the road, enjoying an elephantine slumber after his hard day's labor—being, despite his formidable aspect, quiescent and inoffensive.
I am not sure that it is usual to confer upon steam-rollers the dignity of a name, but my friend had one, and I read it on the neat, black-lettered brass plate affixed to the side of his boiler, near the smoke-stack. This, I take it, was the nearest practicable approach to hanging a locket about his neck that could be managed, and I have always felt grateful to his unknown sponsors for their little act of consideration.
I cannot think of Antaeus otherwise than as a creature—not simply as a creation—as a reasoning and responsible being, rather than as a docile, slavish piece of mechanism; but to the unimaginative he seemed to be under the domination of a tolerably clean specimen of humanity whom I shall call the Driver.