“Something entirely different from the others,” replied Mary. “Here’s what his song sounds to me like:
‘My-coursers-are-fed-with-the-lightning
they-drink-of-the-whirlwind’s-stream.’”
“This sounds like a quotation party,” laughed Billie. “It reminds me of Friday afternoon in the rhetoric class. It’s my turn now, I suppose, and I’m afraid I haven’t got the Oriental imagination that will make a motor car know verses from Shelley and Browning. All I can hear the old Comet sing is
‘Punch-punch-punch-with-care—
punch-in-the-presence-of-the-passengere.’”
“You’ve none of you struck it right,” said Timothy. “This is the song of the motor and once you catch it you never hear anything else:
‘Ketch a nigger by the toe,
Ketch a nigger by the toe.
When he hollers, let ’im go,
When he hollers, let ’im go.’”
“Timothy!” protested the two most poetic souls of the party, Mary and Elinor. But having got that insidious verse in their minds they could not get it out, and for the rest of the journey they heard the motor singing joyfully to himself:
“Ketch a nigger by the toe;
When he hollers, let him go.”
Before them stretched the road like a long white ribbon fading into the blue horizon. But they had left the tangled wildwoods far behind them, and were now passing orange groves hedged in with tall fences of arbor-vitæ or bushes of the roses of Sharon in full bloom, their white blossoms gleaming in the sunshine like a line of new-fallen snow.