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wash the automobile before Boon might have ihad a public chance to refuse to let him do it.
    Because that was when Boon transferred—was transferred by mutual and instantaneous consent—from the day shift at the stable to the night shift. Otherwise, the livery business would have known him no more. That part of our Jefferson leisure class, friends or acquaintances of Father's or maybe just friends of horses, who could have used the stable as a permanent business address—if they had had any business or expected any mail—were less strangers there than Boon. If—when—you, meaning Father, wanted Boon now, you sent me to Grandfather's lot, where he would be washing and polishing the automobile —this, even during those first weeks when it had not left the lot since last Saturday and would not leave it again until the next one, backing it out of the shed and washing it again each morning, with tender absorption, right down to the last spoke and nut, then sitting guard over it while it dried.
    "He's going to soak all the paint off of it," Mr Ballott said. "Does Boss know he's running the hose on that automobile four or five hours every day?"
    "What if he did?" Father said. "Boon would still sit there in the lot all day looking at it."
    "Put him on the night shift," Mr Ballott said. "Then he could do whatever he wants to with his daylight and John Powell could go home and sleep in a bed every night for a change."
    "I already have," Father said. "As soon as I can find somebody to go to that lot and tell him."
    There was a shuck mattress in the harness room on which until now John Powell or one of the other drivers or hostlers under his command always spent the night, mainly as night watchmen against fire. Now Father installed a cot and mattress in the office itself, where Boon could get some sleep, which he needed, since now he could spend all day with complete immunity in Grandfather's lot either washing the automobile or just looking at it.
    So now every afternoon, as many of us as the back seat would hold in our ordered turns would drive through the Square and into the country; Grandfather had already installed the extraneous emergency gear to be as much and inseparable a part of the automobile's equipment as the engine which moved it.
    But always through the Square first. You would have thought that as soon as he bought the automobile, Grandfather would have done what you would have done, having bought the automobile for that end: lain in wait for Colonel Sartoris and his carriage and ambushed, bushwhacked him and really taught him how to pass ordinances restricting others' rights and privileges without consulting his betters first. But Grandfather didn't do this. We finally realised that he wasn't interested in Colonel Sartoris: he was interested in teams, vehicles. Because I told you he was a far-sighted man, a man capable of vision: Grandmother sitting tense and rigid and gripping the top stanchion and not even calling Grandfather Mister Priest now, as she had done as long as we had known her, but calling him by his given name as though she were no kin to him, the horse or team we were approaching reined back and braced to shy and sometimes even rearing and Grandmother saying, "Lucius! Lucius!" and Grandfather (if a man was driving and there were no women or children in the buggy or wagon) saying quietly to Boon:
    "Dont stop. Keep going. But slow now." Or, when a woman had the lines, telling Boon to stop and himself getting out, talking quietly and steadily to the spooked horse until he could get hold of the bit and lead the vehicle past and remove his hat to the ladies in the buggy and come back and get back into the front seat and only then answer Grandmother: "We must get them used to it. Who knows? there may be another automobile in Jefferson in the next ten or fifteen years."
    In fact, that homemade dream which Mr Bufialoe had created single-handed in his back yard two years ago came within an ace of curing