The first day he took down the engine bit by bit.
The clean-swept floor about the dismantled hulk was a spreading turmoil of parts.

Sharon, on cool afterthought, had conceived that his purchase might not have suffered beyond repair, but returning to survey the wreck, had thrown up his fat hands in a gesture of hopeless finality.
"That does settle it," he murmured.

He pointed to the scattered members.
"How in time did you ever find all them fiddlements in that little space ?" Of course no one could ever put them back.
He picked up the book that had come with the car, a book falsely pretending to elucidate its mechanism, even to minor intelligences.

The book was profuse in diagrams, and each diagram was profuse in letters of the alphabet, but these he found uninforming.

For the maker of the car had unaccountably neglected to put A, B, or C on the parts themselves, which rendered the diagrams but maddening puzzles.