, even the best of bicycles, are seductively
irritating.

"Besides, the devil of the Wandering Jew has power over all such as go
upon two wheels. 'Onward,' he says, 'onward! Faster, thou man! This
green and breezy earth is no abiding place for you!' And
hard-breathing, crook-shaped, whirling, bell-banging lunatics try and
race you. They whiz by, thinking indignities of your dignified
progress, and sometimes saying them. Not one cyclist in a dozen,
George, and seemingly not a solitary bicyclist, seems to think of
anything but getting to the end of his pleasure. I meet these servants
of the wheel at the inns, and they tell short stories and sketches
about their pace, and show each other their shoes and saddles, and
compare maps and roads; some even try to trade machines. They talk
most indecently of the makes and prices. I would as soon ask a man who
was his tailor or where he got his hair cut and how much he paid. One
man I met was not so much a man as a hoarding, blatant about the
Gaspipe Machine Company. For them no flowers exist, no wild birds, no
trees, no landscapes, no historical memorials, and no geological
associations, nothing but the roads they traverse and the bicycles they
ride. Those that have other interests have them in the form of cheap
portable cameras, malignant things that can find no beauty in earth or
heaven."

"George," said my uncle, suddenly, and I knew he had come upon a great
discovery; "real human beings are scarce in this world."

"You speak bitterly," said I. "I know what has happened. You are hot
from an inn full of the viler type of cyclist, and I presume that,
after their custom, they mocked at your machinery. But don't blacken a
popular exercise on that account."

"But these men are so aggressive! I tell you, George, it requires
moral courage to ride a tricycle about at a moderate pace, as a man of
discretion should. They want to make a sport of it; they are
race-struck, incapable of understanding a man who rides at seven miles
an hour when he might ride at fifteen. Read their special papers.
They mock and sneer at everything but pace; they worship the makes of
'94 in the interests of their advertising columns; touring simply means
hotel-touting to them, and landscape, deals in cameras; in the end they
will kill cycling--indeed, they are killing it. It is not nice to be
mocked at even when you are in the right; a blatant cad is like a
rhinoceros, and admits of no p