Fortunately we had telegraphed ahead for rooms at the Ten Eyck, or they would not have been able to take us in. The hotel was filled to overflowing with senators and assemblymen, but we had very comfortable rooms and delicious coffee in the morning before we left for Syracuse.
CHAPTER III
A BREAKDOWN
Only two hundred miles from home and a breakdown! We had left Albany early in the morning and were running happily along over a road as smooth as a billiard table. Everything went beautifully until we were about twenty miles from Utica when our “chauffeur” said he heard a squeak. Gloom began to shadow his features. Half a mile further, the squeak became a knock and gloom deepened. He stopped the engine, got out and looked under the hood, lifted the cranking handle once or twice and threw his hands up in a gesture of abject despair. His lips framed all sorts of words but all he said aloud was: “It’s a bearing!” He looked so utterly dejected that in my sympathy for him (starting out on such a trip with a mother and a cousin and neither of us of the slightest use to him) I forgot that we were all equally concerned in whatever this misfortune about a “bearing” might be.
“Couldn’t we try to get to a garage?” timorously asked the one in the back.
Our “chauffeur” shook his head. “Not without wrecking the engine. There is nothing for it but to be towed to a machine shop.”
“And then?” I asked.
“That depends——” was his ambiguous answer, and we said nothing more.
Is there anything more exhilarating than an automobile running smoothly along? Is there anything more dispiriting than the same automobile unable to go? The bigger and heavier it is, the worse the situation seems to be. You might get out and push a little one, but a big car standing stonily silent portends something of the inexorability of Fate.