ever a child, to sink subservient at last to its early playmate.  Just now we in this country are treating nature with great harshness, making of her a drudge and a slave; her pretty hands are soiled, her clean face covered with soot, her clothing tattered and torn.  Some day, we as a nation will tire of playing the taskmaster and will treat the playmate of man’s infancy and youth with more consideration; we will adorn and not disfigure her, love and not ignore her, place her on a throne beside us, make her queen to our kingship.”

“Professor, the automobile hardly falls in with your notions.”

“On the contrary, the automobile is the one absolutely fit conveyance for America.  It is a noisy, dirty, mechanical contrivance, capable of great speed; it is the only vehicle in which one could approach that distant smudge on the landscape with any sense of the eternal fitness of things.  A coach and four would be as far behind the times on this highway as a birch-bark canoe on yonder lake.  In America an automobile is beautiful because it is in perfect harmony with the spirit of the age and country; it is twin brother to the trolley; train, trolley, and automobile may travel side by side as members of one family, late offsprings of man’s ingenuity.”

“But you would not call them things of beauty?”

“Yes and no; beauty is so largely relative that one cannot pronounce hideous anything that is a logical and legitimate development.  Considered in the light of things the world pronounces beautiful, there are no more hideous monstrosities on the face of the earth than train, trolley, and automobile; but each generation has its own standard of beauty, though it seldom confesses it.  We say and actually persuade ourselves that we admire the Parthenon; in reality we admire the mammoth factory and the thirty-story office building.  Strive as we may to deceive ourselves by loud protestations, our standards are not the standards of old.  We like best the things we have; we may call things ugly, but we think them beautiful, for they are part of us,—­and the automobile fits into our surroundings like a pocket in a coat.  We may turn up our noses at it or away from it, as the case may be, but none the less it is the perambulator of the twentieth century.”

It was exactly one o’clock when we pulled up near the City Hall.  Total time from Erie five hours and fifty minutes, actual running time five hours, distance by road about ninety-four miles.

CHAPTER SIX BUFFALO THE MIDWAY

Housing the machine in a convenient and well-appointed stable for automobiles, we were reminded of the fact that we had arrived in Buffalo at no ordinary time, by a charge of three dollars per night for storage, with everything else extra.  But was it not the Exposition we had come to see? and are not Expositions proverbially expensive—­to promoters and stockholders as well as visitors?