customers for machines of high power by advancing the nominal
rating quite beyond the power actually developed.

But already things are changing here, and makers show a
disposition to rate their machines low, for the sake of
astonishing in performance. A man dislikes to admit his machine is
rated at forty horse-power and to acknowledge defeat by a machine
rated at twenty, when the truth is that each machine is probably
about thirty.

The tendency at the present moment is decidedly towards the French
type,--two or four cylinders placed in front.

In the construction of racing-cars and high-speed machines for
such roads as they have on the other side, we have much to learn
from the French,--and we have been slow in learning it. The
conceit of the American mechanic amounts often to blind
stubbornness, but the ease with which the foreign machines have
passed the American in all races on smooth roads has opened the
eyes of our builders; the danger just now is that they will go to
the other extreme and copy too blindly.

In the hands of experts, the foreign racing-cars are the most
perfect road locomotives yet devised; for touring over American
roads in the hands of the amateur they are worse than useless; and
even experts have great difficulty in running week in and week out
without serious breaks and delays. To use a slang phrase, "They
will not stand the racket." However "stunning" they look on
asphalt and macadam with their low, rakish bodies, resplendent in
red and polished brass, on country roads they are very frequently