Naturally! Excellent Under-Slaughterman, vulgarly called Chauffeur! Knows his business! He will ask for a rise next week and he will get it. That paragraph about the little girl trailed along for fifty yards under the rear wheels, with--Hold your tongue, you understand, Higgins--the details would not look well posted up in my club! Brave Under-Slaughterman! He winks an eye, as he has a right to do when he puts his latest-earned gratuity in his pocket. But, halt there! I will do no man an injustice if I can help it. There are motorists and drivers of motor-cars who are noways "motor-fiends," who conduct a car as safely and carefully as in other times they would a pair of horses. I have friends among such. God keep them in life and the practice of "Unto others as I would that others should do unto me!" But I grow old, at least in experience, and I fear for these my friends. Motoring as practiced in Great Britain to-day (and the northern continent is little better) is the direct and intentional abrogation of the Golden Rule. More, it is the only way in which a man, light-heartedly, taking no thought for the morrow, may kill his neighbor with impunity. In old times it was the pursuit of cent.-per-cent. which damned a man, and delivered him bound body and soul to Satan. We have changed all that. Now it is the pursuit of the mile-a-minute which sucks men's hearts empty of a generous feeling, which is the great open-air school for making iron-bound materialists out of human men--or rather animals fitted with deadly mechanical appliances worse than those of Mr. Wells's Martians. I love my friends who are tied to these chariot wheels. But I fear for them. Temptation is great. Easy is the descent of Avernus, aided by a smart chauffeur, who wants to give you "the value of your money" in speed and the survival of the fittest: _id est_, of himself and you! Better, far better, to take pack on back, pilgrim staff in hand, and then--to the woods and the hills with Sweetheart and me, where never "teuf-teuf" can be heard, nor petrol perfume the land. But at least in Sweetheart's new book you will only find the old sweet things, the pleasures that do but gladden, the record of things at once simple and gracious and tender--such as, if you have been fortunate, must have happened to yourself. She does not once mention any car except that pulled along by honest "gees," or that still more favorite sort of all engineering achievements--the fortifications that the next tide will sweep away. Sweetheart, little Sweetheart, and that "dear diary" of yours--for this relief, much thanks! God keep you ever of the humble, of the wayside-goers, of those who think--first, second and always--of the comfort of their fellow-men, especially of the weak, the friendless, and the poor who foot it along life's way. In brief, may you stay what you have always been, Sweet of heart--and _my Heart_! _Ainsi soit-il!_ S. R. CROCKETT. SWEETHEART'S DIARY I SWEETHEART OBJECTS