I had just taken my automobile apart to discover why the engine did not work, and the various pieces of its anatomy were scattered up and down the street for a block or more, and I was hunting up another piece to take out, when I noticed that one of my tires was flat. I had a puncture! I suppose I would have thrilled with joy at any other time, but just after a man has dissected his automobile is no time for him to thrill. He has other things to amuse him. I have even known a man who had just discovered that his last battery had gone dead to swear a little when he discovered that two tires had also gone flat.
It was when I was pumping up that new inner tube that I decided to domesticate my automobile. It seemed to be a shame to take such a delicate piece of machinery out on the rough, unfeeling road, and I remembered that Rolfs had told me of a Philadelphia friend of his who had half domesticated his automobile. Rolfs said that once, when he was foolish, he had ridden half an hour, out to his friend's farm, and there the automobile was jacked up and a belt attached to one of the rear wheels, and in less than five minutes the car was doing duty as a piece of farm machinery, running a feed cutter. Rolfs said it was great. He said it was the only time he ever felt satisfied that an automobile was getting what it deserved. He said that all the men had to do was to keep the fodder-cutter fed with fodder, and that it kept two farm hands busy. He said I ought to get some fodder and cut it that way and stop being an obstruction in the public highways. He suggested that I get some wood and saw wood with the automobile, or get some apples and make cider. He suggested a thousand things I could do with the automobile, and not one of them was riding in it.
I had tried riding in it myself, and after owning it a week or two I decided it was just the kind of automobile that was meant to do general household work. So I domesticated it.
XII. MR. PRAWLEY RETURNS
MARY was one of the most faithful servants a family ever had. Her faithfulness deserves this monument. She was a Pole and she could not pronounce her own name. She tried to pronounce it the first day she came to us, but along toward the sixth or seventh syllable she became confused and had to give it up. She said it was Schneider in English. Perhaps the reason she remained with us so long was because she had brought her Polish name with her, and it was too much trouble to move it from place to place. When she once got in a place, she liked to stay there. But “Schneider” was about the only English word she knew, and this made it a little difficult to explain to her that I had domesticated the automobile and would allow her to use it on wash day. I had to make a picture of it, and even then she seemed rather doubtful about it.
As a matter of fact it was all very simple, but Mary Schneider was stupid. We already had the washing machine, and we had the automobile, and it was only necessary to connect the rear wheel of the automobile with the drive wheel of the washing machine by means of a belt, jack up the rear axle of the automobile, and start the engine. I hoped in time to go further than this and hitch up the coffee mill, the carpet-sweeper, the ice-cream freezer, and all our other household machinery, and then Mary Schneider would have a very easy time of it. She could have sat in the automobile with her hands on the speed levers and the work would have done itself. But Mary would not sit in the automobile. She tried to explain that she had seen me sit in it and that the Schneiders, as a family, had very brittle bones and could not afford to fall out of automobiles of such height, but I could not understand what she was saying. I only understood that she said she would give notice immediately if she had to sit in that automobile while the palpitator was jiggering.