ath whose grip
my bright steel body is flexible as a dipping highroad. Then let me
not forget the sudden clutch of arrest upon my hurrying wheels. Oh,
this is pain to me! While I am rushing forward, surpassing myself in
an _elan vital_, suddenly the awful check grips my back wheel, or my
front wheel, or both. Suddenly there is a fearful arrest. My soul
rushes on before my body, I feel myself strained, torn back. My fibers
groan. Then perhaps the tension relaxes.

So the bicycle will continue to babble about itself. And it will
inevitably wind up with a philosophy. "Oh, if only the great and
divine force rested for ever upon my saddle, and if only the
mysterious will which sways my steering gear remained in place for
ever: then my pedals would revolve of themselves, and never cease, and
no hideous brake should tear the perpetuity of my motions. Then, oh
then I should be immortal. I should leap through the world for ever,
and spin to infinity, till I was identified with the dizzy and
timeless cycle-race of the stars and the great sun...."

Poor old bicycle. The very thought is enough to start a philanthropic
society for the prevention of cruelty to bicycles.

Well, then, our human body is the bicycle. And our individual and
incomprehensible self is the rider thereof. And seeing that the
universe is another bicycle riding full tilt, we are bound to suppose
a rider for that also. But we needn't say what sort of rider. When I
see a cockroach scuttling across the floor and turning up its tail I
stand affronted, and think: A rum sort of rider _you_ must have.
You've no business to have such a rider, do you hear?--And when I hear
the monotonous and plaintive cuckoo in the June woods, I think: Who
the devil made _that_ clock?--And when I see a politician making a
fiery speech on a platform, and the crowd gawping, I think: Lord, save
me--they've all got riders. But Holy Moses! you could never guess what
was coming.--And so I shouldn't like, myself, to start guessing about
the rider of the universe. I am all too flummoxed by the masquerade in
the tourney round about me.

We ourselves then: wisdom, like charity, begins at home. We've each of
us got a rider in the saddle: an individual soul. Mostly it can't
ride, and can't steer, so mankind is like squadrons of bicycles
running amok. We should every one fall off if we didn't ride so thick
that we hold each other up. Horrid nightmare!

As for myself, I have a horror of riding _