Every grade is a new refinement, the same law lifted to a higher plane.

The sensations of the locomotive engineer, who feels his great machine strain forward over the smooth steel rails, are as nothing to the almost numbing sensations of the automobile driver who covered space at the rate of eighty-eight miles an hour on the road between Paris and Madrid: he felt every inequality in the road, every grade along the way, and each curve, each shadow, was a menace that required the greatest nerve and skill.

The ascent is a gradual one, the steepest grade being a trifle over seven per cent, while the train twists and turns around two hundred and sixty curves from the base to the summit.

The maximum grades on tangents are 116 feet per mile; on curves the grade is equated one-tenth to a degree.

The grade may be only a mud hole, out of which the rear wheels have to rise only two feet to be free, but it is as fatal to progress as a hill a mile long.

The fifth grade now was merely a continuation of the fourth and a stepping stone to the sixth.

IV I Form the very start the fifth grade was a disappointment.