Humbly he entreated her one day for an obsolete tooth-brush.
"I want to clean spark-plugs with it," he explained.
"Next," she replied, icily, "you'll be taking your little pet to the dentist, I suppose."
From such encounters Jay-eems would creep back to the barn and seek consolation in tinkering around me.
He liked to take the lid off my transmission-box and gaze at my wondrous works. He was always tightening my axle-burrs, or dosing me with kerosene through my hot-air pipe, or toying with my timer. While he was never so smart as Willie about such things, he was intelligent and quick to learn; and this was not surprising to me after I discovered the nature of his occupation in life.
I had taken him to be a retired silk-worm fancier, a chronic juryman, or something of the sort. But shiver my windshield if he wasn't a professor in a college!
On the morning when first he dared to drive me to his work, the college must have got wind of our coming, for the students turned out in a body to cheer him as he steered in at the campus gate, and the faculty gathered on the steps to shake his hand.
A bald-headed preceptor asked him if he meant to cyanide me and mount me on a pin for preservation in the college museum. The chancellor inquired if Todd had identified me. Todd said he had. He said I was a perfect specimen of Automobilum cursus gandium, the most beautiful species of the Golikellece family. It was the nearest he ever came to profanity in my hearing. I suppose he got it from associating with Willie.
They demanded a speech, and he made one—about me. He said that my name was Hilaritas, signifying joy. He said, among other flattering things, that I was no common mundane contraption, though such I might seem to the untutored eye. In their studies of the Greek drama they had read of gods from the machine. I was a machine from the gods. In my cylinders I consumed nectar vapour, in my goo-cups ambrosia, in my radiator flowed the crystal waters of the Fount of Bandusia.
Three other items of his eulogium I remember: The breath of Pan inflated my tires, I could climb Olympus in high, and he, James Todd, a mere professor in a college, while sitting at my wheel, would not bare his head to Zeus himself, no, nor even to the chairman of the college board of trustees.
His nonsense appeared to be as popular in that part of town as it was unpopular in another. They gave the varsity yell with his name at the end.