somebody whether it was a good thing to take hold of. But that
would not suit him; he would be one of the self-taught kind that
go by experience; he would want to examine for himself. And he
would find, for his instruction, that the coiled patriarch shuns
the electric wire; and it would be useful to him, too, and would
leave his education in quite a complete and rounded-out
condition, till he should come again, some day, and go to
bouncing a dynamite-can around to find out what was in it.
But we wander from the point. However, get a teacher; it
saves much time and Pond’s Extract.
Before taking final leave of me, my instructor inquired
concerning my physical strength, and I was able to inform him
that I hadn’t any. He said that that was a defect which would
make up-hill wheeling pretty difficult for me at first; but he
also said the bicycle would soon remove it. The contrast between
his muscles and mine was quite marked. He wanted to test mine,
so I offered my biceps–which was my best. It almost made him
smile. He said, “It is pulpy, and soft, and yielding, and
rounded; it evades pressure, and glides from under the fingers;
in the dark a body might think it was an oyster in a rag.”
Perhaps this made me look grieved, for he added, briskly: “Oh,
that’s all right, you needn’t worry about that; in a little while
you can’t tell it from a petrified kidney. Just go right along
with your practice; you’re all right.”
Then he left me, and I started out alone to seek adventures.
You don’t really have to seek them–that is nothing but a phrase
–they come to you.
I chose a reposeful Sabbath-day sort of a back street which
was about thirty yards wide between the curbstones. I knew it
was not wide enough; still, I thought that by keeping strict
watch and wasting no space unnecessarily I could crowd through.
Of course I had trouble mounting the machine, entirely on my
own responsibility, with no encouraging moral support from the
outside, no sympathetic instructor to say, “Good! now you’re
doing well–good again–don’t hurry–there, now, you’re all right
–brace up, go ahead.” In place of this I had some other
support. This was a boy, who was perched on a gate-post munching
a hunk of maple sugar.
He was full of interest and comment. The first time I
failed and went down he said that if he was me he would dress up
in pillows, that’s what he would do. The next time I went down
he advised me to go and learn to ride a tricycle first. The
third time I collapsed he said he didn’t believe I could stay on
a horse-car. But the next time I succeeded, and got clumsily
under way in a weaving, tottering, uncertain fashion, and
occupying pretty much all of the street. My slow and lumbering
gait filled the boy to the chin with scorn, and he sung out, “My,
but don’t he rip along!” Then he got down from his post and
loafed along the sidewalk, still observing and occasionally
commenting. Presently he dropped into my wake and followed along
behind. A little girl passed by, balancing a wash-board on her
head, and giggled, and seemed about to make a remark, but the boy
said, rebukingly, “Let him alone, he’s going to a funeral.”
I have been familiar with that street for years, and had
always supposed it was a dead level; but it was not, as the
bicycle now informed me, to my surprise. The bicycle, in the
hands of a novice, is as alert and acute as a spirit-level in the
detecting the delicate and vanishing shades of difference in
these matters. It notices a rise where your untrained eye would
not observe that one existed; it notices any decline which water
will run down. I was toiling up a slight rise, but was not aware
of it. It made me tug and pant and perspire; and still, labor as
I might, the machine came almost to a standstill every little while.
At such times the boy would say: “That’s it! take a rest–