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with a handsome bicycle. I was on hand at Newt’s farm where the presentation ceremonies were held, and an impressive occasion it was.
    As head of the clan, Pa spoke first, punctuating his blood-curdling remarks with wild slashes of his cane which might well have brained less agile youths. Newt and Bob were the next speakers, in that order, brandishing their respective cane and ferrule. Then, with the air sizzling with profane threats, the ladies stepped forth wielding whips and switches. And while their vocabularies were free of curses, their lectures were nonetheless fearsome and awe-inspiring. The general feeling seemed to have been expressed by Pa’s declaration that the boys had better, by God, behave themselves and take care of their bikes or they would be nailed to the barn door and skinned alive.
    The boys listened with seeming meekness. Then, accompanied by me, they repaired to the interior of the barn where they proceeded to disassemble the bicycles into several hundred odd pieces.
    Discovered in this outrage, as they soon were, the two youths pleaded for time. Given a matter of a week, they promised, and they would convert those childish playthings, the bicycles, into a thing of great beauty and utility. Exasperated and exhausted, the adult relatives gave their consent without striking a blow.
    The week passed in a hubbub of furious activity. The boys acquired several sheets of stout roofing tin. They got hold of a quantity of hard wood and steel rod and paint, and the basic parts of an old gasoline water pump. Assisted by me, they pounded and sawed, shaped and soldered, painted and sawed and bolted together. And by the eve of the seventh day, so very real—though often misdirected—was their genius, they had created an automobile.
    It looked like an automobile—save for the wheels—down to the minutest detail. It ran quite as well as many of the automobiles of that day.
    Our adult kin were both dumbfounded and delighted as we made a brief trial run up and down the barn corridor. All unsuspecting of the ultimate and abysmal objectives of the two youths, they made no protest when the latter announced that the first full-scale demonstration would be held on the morrow.
    Both my cousins and I spent the night at Newt’s house. The following morning, attired in our Sunday’s best, we marched haughtily into the barn. We tuned and oiled the motor of our automobile until it purred like a cat. We wiped the gleaming red body free of the last speck of dust. Then, we climbed into the front seat, with me in the middle, and drove grandly out into the yard.
    We circled it twice, allowing our beaming relatives and the neighbors they had pridefully summoned to feast their eyes upon us. With this, the promised demonstration taken care of, we suddenly roared full-speed to our previously determined destination—the open door to the food cellar.
    The door was flush with the ground and opened into a long steep flight of stairs leading under the house. We went crashing and smashing down them, shedding fenders and other of the automobile’s components as well as sizeable bits of our own epidermis. Then, at the bottom, where the steps ended in an upright door, the engine shot from beneath the hood and we shot over it. The whole house shook with the impact of flying bodies and machinery, and the explosions of fruit and vegetable jars.
    Bruised, bleeding and besmeared, we managed to claw our way back to daylight and the fearsome reception awaiting us. But the automobile had so wrecked the stairs and jammed into the lower door that no one could get back down into the cellar.
    As soon as he could do anything but curse, Newt announced that he was through. “I give up, by God,” he stated, and he declared that since the family was cut off from its supply of fruit and vegetables, they could all simply die of scurvy and the sooner the better. “There’s a hell of a lot worse ways of dying,” he pointed out grimly, and no one could