Excuse My Dust

xiii, 359 pp. When the First Automobiles came chugging up Main Street in the Home town of Country Lawyer, driving the horses up the telephone poles and raising an intolerable dust, they overturned the old order of country life with the violence of an invading army. It is of these turbulent days when sparkplugs and miles-per-gallons were first becoming current in Phelps, N.Y. that Bellamy Partridge us writing in "Excuse My Dust" the last in the "Country Lawyer"-- "Big Family" trilogy.. Many of the favorite Partridge characters are in the narrative while the main character is young, ambitious Tom Hunter, the bicycle and automobile mechanic around whom the story is built. New blood was slowly replacing that of old the generation whose Motto was " What was good enough for my father is good enough for me." The Telephone and nickelodeon had added somewhat to the pleasure and convenience of their existence---but the automobile was another matter. As it came into its own the hitching rails for Old Dobbin were shoved first into the side streets, and later on the woodpile. Here we Tom Hunter putting up a sign which reads G-A-R-A-G-E, and hear the townsmen disputing its meaning and pronunciation.. Tom had his counterpart in every other small town in the country, and his is a story of the battle against horse and buggy tradition that will carry you back to those lost turn of the century days.