lightest loads. It was only when market conditions were very
abnormal that the farmers in the valley would draw their hay,
grain, and produce to Pittsfield.

The new State road winds around and over the mountain at a grade
nowhere exceeding five per cent. and averaging a little over four.
It is a broad macadam, perfectly constructed.

In going up this easy and perfectly smooth ascent for some six or
seven miles, the disadvantage of having no intermediate-speed
gears was forcibly illustrated, for the grade was just too stiff
for the high-speed gear, and yet so easy that the engine tended to
race on the low, but we had to make the entire ascent on the
hill-climbing gear at a rate of about four or five miles an hour;
an intermediate-gear would have carried us up at twelve or fifteen
miles per hour.




CHAPTER TWELVE AN INCIDENT OF TRAVEL
"THE COURT CONSIDERS THE MATTER"

In Pittsfield the machine frightened a lawyer,--not a woman, or a
child, or a horse, or a donkey,--but just a lawyer; to be sure,
there was nothing to indicate he was a lawyer, and still less that
he was unusually timid of his kind, therefore no blame could
attach for failing to distinguish him from men less nervous.

That he was frightened, no one who saw him run could deny; that he