until formidable circumstances, or a much larger man than himself
forced him to it.

Foot-passengers were mere pestering flies with an insane
disregard for their legs and his convenience. He could not
conceive their maniacal desires to cross the streets. Their
madness smote him with eternal amazement. He was continually
storming at them from his throne. He sat aloft and denounced their
frantic leaps, plunges, dives and straddles.

When they would thrust at, or parry, the noses of his champing
horses, making them swing their heads and move their feet,
disturbing a solid dreamy repose, he swore at the men as fools,
for he himself could perceive that Providence had caused it clearly
to be written, that he and his team had the unalienable right to stand
in the proper path of the sun chariot, and if they so minded,
obstruct its mission or take a wheel off.

And, perhaps, if the god-driver had an ungovernable desire to
step down, put up his flame-colored fists and manfully dispute the
right of way, he would have probably been immediately opposed by a
scowling mortal with two sets of very hard knuckles.

It is possible, perhaps, that this young man would have
derided, in an axle-wide alley, the approach of a flying ferry
boat. Yet he achieved a respect for a fire engine. As one charged
toward his truck, he would drive fearfully upon a sidewalk,
threatening untold people with annihilation. When an engine would
strike a mass of blocked trucks, splitting it into fragments, as a
blow annihilates a cake of ice, Jimmie's team could usually be