While I'm still in the pulpit, let me recommend you to husband your energies. Don't play tennis all the afternoon (even with Amaryllis) if you have been up all night. Go to sleep in the hammock, instead, over a book or a paper or a letter from Uncle Peter. And don't forget sometimes to say your prayers. For whatever may be one's private notions as to their ultimate Destination; whether one affects a belief in some beneficent Overlord, once incarnate; or regards God as the ever-growing sum of all higher human volitions; or, remembering this infinitesimal particle of earth in the greatness of the universe, considers such a conception to be inadequate; or admits only some possible Starting-point, a kind of Divine Convenience upon which to found theories; or has never thought about the matter at all--it's always a gracious and comforting act to remove one's moral hat, as it were (even if reverence goes no further) to Something at any rate bigger than most of us. While even on the very chilliest of auto-suggestion grounds there is still a word to be said for it as a vehicle wherein to despatch one's extra troubles to some handy mental cemetery. For prayer, whether we look upon it as sacred or superstitious, must still, as the hymn says, be the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed. And occasional expression is about as valuable a prelude to the acquiring of knowledge as any that are going. So I may as well tell you at once that I know nothing whatever about motor-cars, and therefore find the last half of your letter entirely unintelligible. But I gather that the one you mean to purchase combines speed, silence, and freedom from odour in a quite unusual degree. Some day, no doubt, I shall be sponging upon you for a lesson in driving it--or him--or do you call the thing her? Yr. affect. uncle, PETER HARDING. XXVII _To Miss Sarah Harding, The Orphanage, Little Blessington, Dorset._ 91B HARLEY STREET, W., _November_ 7, 1910. MY DEAR SALLY, This is going to be a short letter because the news that it contains is probably speeding to you already--from Esther, to whom its greatness is not unmixed with tears; and from Molly, to whom its joy is of the eternal gold. Ten days ago she came back to us from Stoke, where, as she told us, she had been having a good time, but seemed now to have fulfilled her little contract. For the house-party had broken up: Horace had long ago made a late return to Cambridge; Carthew was in the Temple, and Pole in Fleet Street; Hilary and Norah were off to Spain; and the one or two extra guns, just leisurely shooting men, had betaken themselves, at any rate superficially regretful, to other people's houses. Lady Wroxton was better--very nearly her old self, and for the moment wrapped up, heart and soul, in her nephew Rupert. It had been a pleasant visit. She kissed us very tenderly. And now it was high time that she was back again among her girls at Hoxton.