Araminta and the Automobile

I have been asked to say a few words to you before you get busy with my little book that is filled with “Cheerful Americans” going out for automobile rides.

A generation or two ago, there was a poor writer (I mean poor in this world’s goods, of course) and he saw people riding about in automobiles as if they owned them, and it made him wish he could ride about in one as if he owned it. But he lacked the nerve, so he had to be content with trolleys.

After a while he made believe that he had bought an automobile, and he rode around in it with “Araminta,” and enjoyed the motion so much that he set others to riding in automobiles that he made himself in his study, and he was much pleased at the way they “went.”

After a while he made a collection of these stories and they went some more, and now they are off for a cross country trip that will undoubtedly result in the critics saying of the writer, “He has the pen of a Charles Dickens;” or “he reminds one of Robert Louis Stevenson at his best;” or “he succeeds, as no man since Sir Walter Scott has succeeded, in writing automobile stories that cause the helpless and fascinated reader to sit up all night regardless of anything save the flight of the machine;” or perhaps they will say “the mantle of Bret Harte has fallen upon him, and with the possible exception of Nathaniel Hawthorne no one has written such tales of the clutch and brake and sparker.”

Readers, need I tell you who that poor writer was? The poor boy who in 1865 had never even seen an automobile stands before you, and his name is

CHARLES BATTELL LOOMIS.