guys who knows it all, eh? You’re a pretty wise guy, aren’t you?” the motorist continued bitterly, as if caught up in the circle of his refrain and unable to change it. “Well, let me tell you something. You think you’re pretty smaht, don’t you? Well, you’re not. See? It’s wise guys like you who go around looking for a good bust on the nose. See? That’s how smaht you are. If you wasn’t an old guy I’d give you one, too,” he said, getting a moody satisfaction from the thought.
“Ow-w! Ow-w! Ow-w!” Bascom howled in sudden terror.
“If you know so much, if you’re so smaht as you think you are, what is the traffic law?”
Then, assuredly, if there was a traffic law, the unfortunate motorist was lost, for Uncle Bascom would deliver it to him verbatim, licking his lips with joy over all the technicalities of legal phrasing and pronouncing each phrase with a meticulous and pedantic enunciation.
“And furthermore!” he howled, holding up his big bony finger, “the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has decreed, by a statute that has been on the books since 1856, by a statute that is irrevocably, inexorably, ineluctably plain that any driver, director, governor, commander, manager, agent or conductor, or any other person who shall conduct or cause to be conducted any vehicular instrument, whether it be of two, four, six, eight or any number of wheels whatsoever, whether it be in the public service, or in the possession of a private individual, whether it be—” but by this time the motorist, if he was wise, had had enough and had escaped.
If, however, it had been one of his more fortunate mornings, if he had blindly but successfully threaded the peril of roaring traffic, Uncle Bascom proceeded rapidly down State Street, still clutching his raw bony hands across his meagre waist, still contorting his remarkable face in its endless series of pursed grimaces, and presently turned in to the entrance of a large somewhat dingy-looking building of blackened stone, one of those solid, unpretentious, but very valuable properties which smell and look like the early 1900’s, and which belong to that ancient and enormously wealthy corporation across the river known as Harvard University.
Here, Uncle Bascom, still clutching himself together across the waist, mounted a flight of indented marble entry steps, lunged through revolving doors into a large marble corridor that was redolent with vibrating waves of hot steamy air, wet rubbers and galoshes, sanitary disinfectant and serviceable but somewhat old-fashioned elevators and, entering
