"What happened to Henry and the ninety-horse machine?" I asked.
"And where does the elephant come in?"

Alfred smiled pityingly.

"Ain't I tellin' yer," he said. "You wouldn't understand if I didn't
tell yer how he got the car and all that. So here's Henery," he went on,
"with old John Bull goin' about in the fastest car in Australia,
and old John, he's a quiet old geezer, that wouldn't drive faster
than the regulations for anything, and that short-sighted he can't see
to the side of the road. So what does Henery do? He fixes up
the speed-indicator -- puts a new face on it, so that when the car
is doing thirty, the indicator only shows fifteen, and twenty for forty,
and so on. So out they'd go, and if Henery knew there was a big car
in front of him, he'd let out to forty-five, and the pace would very near
blow the whiskers off old John; and every now and again he'd look
at the indicator, and it'd be showin' twenty-two and a half, and he'd say:

"`Better be careful, Henery, you're slightly exceedin' the speed limit;
twenty miles an hour, you know, Henery, should be fast enough for anybody,
and you're doing over twenty-two.'

"Well, one day, Henery told me, he was tryin' to catch up a big car
that just came out from France, and it had a half-hour start of him,
and he was just fairly flyin', and there was a lot of cars on the road,
and he flies past 'em so fast the old man says, `It's very strange,
Henery,' he says, `that all the cars that are out to-day are comin'
this way,' he says. You see he was passin' 'em so fast he thought
they were all comin' towards him.