“Put on the brakes, damme!” I yelled.

The child rolled the whites of his eyes towards me and announced briefly, “Brake’s broke.”

I looked about for a soft place to jump.  There was none; only rock-plated highway whizzing past.

We took the first bend with the nearside wheels in the gutter, the off-side wheels on the bank, the car tilted at an angle of forty-five degrees.  The second bend we navigated at an angle of sixty degrees, the off-side wheels on the bank, the near-side wheels pawing thin air.

Had there been another bend we should have accomplished it upside down.  Fortunately there were no more; but there remained the village street.  We pounced on it like a tiger upon its prey.

“Blow your horn!” I screamed to the child.

“Bulb’s bust,” said he shortly, and exhibited the instrument, its squeeze missing.

I have one accomplishment—­only one—­acquired at the tender age of eleven at the price of relentless practice and a half-share in a ferret.  I can whistle on my fingers.  Sweeping into that unsuspecting hamlet I remembered this lone accomplishment of mine, plunged two fingers into my cheeks and emptied my chest through them.

“Honk, honk,” blasted something in my ear and, glancing round, I saw that the child had swallowed the bulbless end of his horn and was using it bugle-wise.

Thus, shrilling and honking, we swooped through Bailleul-aux-Hondains, zig-zagging from kerb to kerb.  A speckly cock and his platoon of hens were out in midstream, souvenir-hunting.  We took them in the rear before they had time to deploy and sent a cloud of fluff-fricassee sky-high.  A Tommy was passing the time o’ day with the Hebe of the Hotel des Trois Enfants, his mules contentedly browsing the straw frost-packing off the town water supply.  The off-donkey felt the hot breath of the car on his hocks and gained the salle-a-manger (via the window) in one bound, taking master and mate along with him.

The great-great-granddam of the hamlet was tottering across to the undertakers to have her coffin tried on, when my frantic whistling and the bray of the bugle-horn pierced the deafness of a century.  With a loud creaking of hinges she turned her head, summed up the situation at a glance and, casting off half-a-dozen decades “like raiment laid apart,” sprang for the side-walk with the agility of an infant gazelle.  We missed her by half-an-inch and she had nobody but herself to thank.

Against a short incline, just beyond the stricken village, the car came to a standstill of its own accord, panting brokenly, quivering in every limb.

“She’s red-’ot,” said the child, and I believed him.

From the kettle arrangement in the bows came the sound of hot water singing merrily, while from the spout steam issued hissing.  The tin trunk, in which lurks the clockwork, emitted dense volumes of petrol-perfumed smoke from every chink.  The child climbed across me and, dropping overboard, opened the lid and crawled inside.  I lit a pipe and perused the current “La Vie Parisienne.”