But Frederick reined the horse in so tightly, that he actually succeeded in pulling him up just as the Boston-New York express thundered by on a line of railroad tracks crossing the street not safeguarded by gates or fence.  Frederick wondered how it was that a multitude of children, workmen, gentlemen in high hats, ladies in silk dresses, horses, dogs, trucks, and carriages were not mangled to a pulp and dashed against the walls of the houses lining the tracks.  The horse plunged and reared and shot forward over the rails behind the last coach, sending clods of ice and snow flying in Frederick’s and Peter’s faces.

“The devil!” snorted Frederick.  “Now for the first time I observe that form of madness which is specifically American.  If you fall under the wheels, you fall under the wheels.  If you want to take a drive, be your own coachman.  If you break your bones, you break your bones.  If you break your neck, you break your neck.”

Farther along on the same highway Frederick for the first time saw an electric street car, then still unknown in Europe.  The brilliant sparking at the meeting of the trolley and the overhead wire was to him a new, stimulating phenomenon.  The posts holding up the wire were all shapes, thick and slender, bowed and slanting, so that the whole made a promiscuous impression, though the coaches were of a pleasing shape and glided along with great rapidity.

They had passed the more frequented and dangerous section of the city without an accident and had reached the open country.  The houses grew lower and farther apart.  Before the chestnut with his jingling bells lay an endless stretch of unblocked roadway, with excellent tracks for the sleigh worn into the snow.  The valiant American could speed to his heart’s content.

“How strange!” thought Frederick.  “Here I am riding in a sleigh and driving a horse, things I have not done since I was a boy.”

Stories of sports and incidents that he had not thought of for ten years or more occurred to him.  How his father’s accounts of hunting expeditions and sleighing mishaps had set them all laughing when the family was cosily gathered together in one room on a winter evening.

During that brisk, refreshing drive Frederick’s heart was rejuvenated.  The happiest years of his boyhood were as vivid to him as yesterday—­thrilling, romantic rides by night, when the same sound of sleigh-bells scared the silence of sleeping forests and filled the boy’s soul with pictures of midnight attacks, romantic murders, and strange devilish phantoms.  In the dazzling brilliance of the snowy fields, breathing in the pure, bracing air, mere existence became unspeakable bliss.  Sitting there in that dainty sleigh Frederick was inclined to look on life as a pleasure drive.