the streets, Bascom still preached from the corner: as soon as he recovered somewhat from his shock, he would launch forth into a sermon of eloquent invective against any driver of motor cars within hearing, and if any of them entered the fray, as sometimes happened, a very interesting performance occurred.
“What happened to you?” the motorist might bitterly remark. “Do the keepers know you’re out?”
Mr. Pentland would thereupon retort with an eloquent harangue, beginning with a few well-chosen quotations from the more violent prophets of the Old Testament, a few predictions of death, destruction and damnation for the owners of motor cars, and a few apt references to Days of Judgment and Reckoning, Chariots of Moloch, and Beasts of the Apocalypse.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” the exasperated motorist might reply. “Are you blind? Where do you think you are? In a cow-pasture? Can’t you read the signals? Didn’t you see the cop put his hand up? Don’t you know when it says to’Stop’or’Go’? Did you ever hear of the traffic law?”
“The traffic law!” Bascom sneeringly exclaimed, as if the mere use of the word by the motorist evoked his profoundest contempt. His voice now had a precise and meticulous way of speech, there was something sneering and pedantic in the way he pronounced each word, biting it off with a prim, nasal and heavily accented enunciation in the manner of certain pedants and purists who suggest by their pronunciation that language in the mouths of most people is vilely and carelessly treated, that each word has a precise, subtle, and careful meaning of its own, and that they—they alone—understand these matters. “The traffic law!” he repeated again: then he squinted his eyes together, pursed his rubbery lip against the big horsy upper teeth, and laughed down his nose in a forced, sneering manner. “The traffic law!” he said. “Why, you pit-i-ful ig-no-ram-us! You il-lit-ter-ate ruffian! You dare to speak to me—to me!” he howled suddenly with an ecclesiastical lift of his voice, striking himself on his bony breast and glaring with a majestical fury as if the word of a mighty prophet had been contradicted by an upstart—“of the traffic law, when it is doubtful if you could read the law if you saw it,”—he sneered—“and it is obvious to anyone with the perception of a schoolboy that you would not have intelligence enough to understand it, and”—here his voice rose to a howling emphasis and he held one huge bony finger up to command attention—“and to interpret it, if you could read.”
“Is that so?” the motorist heavily remarked. “A wise guy, eh? One of these
