"If you mean the electric cars which I have been reading about in the Press," so her grandmother's letter ran, "remember that I have already seen street cars running up and down hill in San Francisco without any horses to draw them, and that it won't be any more surprising to see them running all alone in Portland, even if it is electricity this time which makes them go."
"Can't astonish Grandma, can we?" said Harriet's father, smiling.
It certainly was hard to do so. Grandma had always been a traveler. She was born in Bath, Maine, in the days when Maine was famous for its ship building, and Maine sailing vessels went all around the world. Her father had been a sea captain and Grandma had been to China with him before she was eighteen; her husband also had been a sea captain and she had been around the world twice with him. Grandma had seen so much and was always so interested in what was going on in the world that when she went to Portland to visit her oldest son the family there used to say jokingly:
"We must find something new to show Grandma or she won't feel that she has been anywhere."
They had all expected Grandma to think it as wonderful as they did that electricity could take the place of horses, and had expected her to be very anxious to see the new cars of which so much had been written. Evidently she did not think them very much ahead of the cable cars.
"Don't be disappointed, Harriet," said Mr. Lewis to his little ten-year old daughter, who was Grandma's namesake. "Wait until Grandma has seen the new cars; perhaps then she will think it as marvelous as we do that electricity can be harnessed to make these cars slide along the rails. She never has believed that electric cars would be a success."
"I remember last year when she was here," said Harriet's mother, turning to the little girl's father, "how she used to say, 'I don't like horse cars on these Maine hills. You ought to have cable cars. They are the only proper things for hills!' and how you used to say, 'Wait until next year, Mother, and you shall see something better than cable cars.'"
"She always answered, I recall," added Mr. Lewis, "'John, never in my lifetime or yours will electricity be anything but a mystery and a danger. It may be used to some extent for lighting, but, mark my words, it can never be made to run heavily loaded cars. It is too absurd to consider.'"
When Grandma reached Portland, Harriet and her father met her at the station, and drove her home behind steady old Prince, who had drawn the family carriage for years. As they jogged along on the way to the house they met an electric car.
"I really don't see why it should go, but it is plain that it does go. If they keep on going for another twenty-four hours, I am going to have a ride in one to-morrow morning," said Grandma.