the way you fellows do it!" He clenched his fingers as if upon the
handle of a house-painter's brush. "Slap, dash--there's your road." He
paddled the air with the imaginary brush as though painting the side of
a barn. "Swish, swash--there go your fields and your stone bridge. Fit!
Speck! And there's your old woman, her red handkerchief, and what your
dealer will probably call 'the human interest,' all complete. Squirt the
edges of your foliage in with a blow-pipe. Throw a cup of tea over the
whole, and there's your haze. Call it 'The Golden Road,' or 'The Bath of
Sunlight,' or 'Quiet Noon.' Then you'll probably get a criticism
beginning, 'Few indeed have more intangibly detained upon canvas so
poetic a quality of sentiment as this sterling landscapist, who in
Number 136 has most ethereally expressed the profound silence of evening
on an English moor. The solemn hush, the brooding quiet, the homeward
ploughman--'"

He was interrupted by an outrageous uproar, the grisly scream of a siren
and the cannonade of a powerful exhaust, as a great white touring-car
swung round us from behind at a speed that sickened me to see, and,
snorting thunder, passed us "as if we had been standing still."

It hurtled like a comet down the curve and we were instantly choking in
its swirling tail of dust.

"Seventy miles an hour!" gasped George, swabbing at his eyes. "Those are
the fellows that get into the pa--Oh, Lord! THERE they go!"

Swinging out to pass us and then sweeping in upon the reverse curve to
clear the narrow arch of the culvert were too much for the white car;
and through the dust we saw it rock dangerously. In the middle of the
road, ten feet from the culvert, the old woman struggled frantically to