"Gone home with the chariot?" said Ned, in astonishment.
"Yes," said Phaeton, "I have given it to him. I saw, by the way he looked at it and talked about it, that it would be a great prize to him, and I didn't intend to use it any more myself, so I made him a present of it."
"But you had no right to," said Ned. "That chariot was built with my money."
"Not exactly," said Phaeton. "It was built with money that I borrowed of you. I still owe you the money, but the car was mine."
"Well, at any rate," said Ned, who saw this point clearly enough, "you might have sold the iron on it for enough to buy another font of type."
"Yes, I might," said Phaeton. "But I preferred giving it to Patsy. He's a good deal of a boy, and I hope Father won't forget that he said he should do something for him."
"But what use will the car be to him?" said Ned.
"He says it'll be a glorious thing to slide down hill in summer," said Phaeton.
A few days afterward, Patsy came again to see Phaeton, and wanted to know if he could not invent some means by which the car could be prevented from going down hill too fast. He said that when Berny Rourke and Lukey Finnerty and he took their first ride in it, down one of the long, grassy slopes that bordered the Deep Hollow, it went swifter, and swifter, until it reached the edge of the brook, where it struck a lump of sod and threw them all into the water.
"Water is an excellent thing," said Ned, "for a sudden stoppage of a swift ride. They always use it in horizontal balloon-ascensions, and on the Underground Railroad they're going to build all the depots of it."