"Is that you, Herbert?" I said in surprise.

It was.

Strange how machinery can influence a man. The last time I had seen Herbert he was a rubicund cheerful gardener. He was now a London taxi-driver, with all the signs of that mystery on him: the shabbiness, the weariness, the disdain.

"Are you glad you gave up gardening?" I asked him.

"Can't say I am now," he replied. "There's more money in this, but the work's too hard. I miss my sleep, too."

"You can always go back," I said.

"I wonder," he replied. "I'd like to. This being at every one's beck and call who happens to have a shilling is what I'm tired of."

"What about tips?" I asked.

"I get plenty of them," he said. "In fact, if the clock registers tenpence or one and fourpence or one and tenpence I practically always get the odd twopence. That's all right. It's the people who don't want to tip but daren't not do it that I can't stand. And there are such lots of them. That's what makes taxi-drivers look so contemptuous like—the tips. People think we want the tips; but there's a time when we'd rather go without them than get them like that."

I sympathised with him.

"Then there are the fares who always know a quicker way than we do. They're terrors. They keep on tapping on the glass to direct us, when we know all about it all the time. It's them that leads to some of the accidents, because they take your eyes off the road."

I sympathised again and made some mental notes for future behaviour myself.

"But the pedestrians are the worst," he continued.

"The pedestrians?"

"Yes, the people who walk across the road without giving a thought to the fact that there might be a vehicle coming. The people that never learn. The people that call you names or make faces at you after you've saved their silly lives by blowing the hooter at them. Every minute of the day one is having trouble with them, and it gets on one's nerves. It's them that makes a taxi-driver look old sooner than a woman."

"So you'll go back to the land?" I said.

"I don't know," he said. "I'd like to, but petrol gets into the blood, you know."

I suppose it does.

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"Dr. Grenfell remarked that the tourist traffic [to Labrador] was beginning to grow. Life in winter was very attractive, and was enjoyed as people enjoyed winter in Norway. One of his few personal reminiscences was how he fell through the ice and expected to be frozen to death."—Manchester Guardian.

Us for Labrador, every time.

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Paragraph in a petition addressed to a Government official by a Baboo who wished to protest against the conduct of another Baboo:—

"His hatred of me is so much that in the heat of his animosity he wilfully omitted to put in the formal ephithet 'Mr.' to my name, which no man of honour would drop because not so much for disregarding me, but that he would be doing injustice to the European etiquette."

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