QUOUSQUE TANDEM? 165 



the sight of a passing tandem produced the idea that should 

 have developed itself spontaneously if everyone were imagina- 

 tive and original. The next step was to confide the acquired 

 idea to a celebrated horse-dealer, whose opinion on the subject 

 was given much in these terms : ' I always look upon a man 

 as drives a tandem as a fool ; he makes two hosses do the work 

 of one and most likely breaks his silly neck.' Nothing could 

 be more satisfactory to ambitious youth than that, and so no 

 one will wonder that in about a fortnight after the delivery of the 

 oracle two horses might have been seen in the middle of a road 

 about half a mile from their stable standing, or rather struggling, 

 side by side, but head and tail in an inextricable tangle of 

 harness, reins and long whip, somehow attached to a tall dog- 

 cart on the top of which sat an utterly helpless and perplexed 

 would-be charioteer ! 



This little difficulty probably originated the Tandem Club. 

 There were only two important spectators of it, standing at safe 

 distances on opposite sides of the road. One was for the moment 

 a very anxious parent, and the other a past master in all the 

 arts of riding, driving, racquets, cricket, and other manly sports. 

 When the horses had been put straight and had acquired a con- 

 fidence that their driver neither possessed in himself nor in 

 them collectively or individually, they careered away without any 

 more notable trouble until, with true military instinct, they 

 returned quietly to their barracks and food. Said the anxious 

 parent to his friend across the road, ' Will you for Heaven's sake 

 try and prevent my boy from breaking his neck ? for / can't.' 

 The answer was, ' I will. I will teach him to drive a tandem.' . . . 

 Now it may be doubted whether that promise was exhaustively 

 satisfactory to a fond father, but at all events it was carried out, 

 so that not very long afterwards Mentor and Telemachus, or for 

 short M. and T., would often sit together in the same vehicle 

 with a relative sense of security and a positive one of pleasure 

 in driving over every road for miles around, and interchanging 

 jocosities with the envious. As chaff did not drive the one 

 tandem off the road, and as it is human to err and to be 



