SOMETHING ABOUT BICYCLES.

Southern Cross, Volume 2, Issue 33, 10 November 1894, Page 11

SOMETHING ABOUT BICYCLES.

Do I know anything about bicycles? T know a good deal about them. I live in the house with a man who owns one ; it's a pneumatic tyre safety, and it’s “ the best one Godward ever had in his shop.” My friend’s faith in Godward is childlike. The owner of this pneumatic tyre safety keeps it in his bedroom (they all appear to keep them in their bedrooms), and the day the hall floor is ■washed it generally rains. Of course my friend never dreams of wiping his wheels. You might as well expect a Grand Duke to wipe his feet on the door mat, and the beautifully-pol-ished floor has nice white lines along it matching the colour of the gravel outside. Oh, yes, I know a good deal about bicycles. The owner of this pneumatic*tyre safety came home the other evening with a new lamp, which he lit, and called upon me to admire. I did so, especially the red glass. I’m very fond of red glass. The mechanism of the lamp did not strike me as being so very wonderful ; the only really wonderful thing about it was the price. I strained every nerve to admire it up to his expectations, but evidently failed, for, after littering the dining room with oil cans, dusters, -screw wrenches, &c., he took this wonderful lamp into the children’s room, thirsting still for admiration, aroused them all up, woke the baby, who cried for an hour, and then went

out for a ride, leaving me to straighten up after him. Oh, yes, I know a good deal about bicycles! And so far I think that a mother’s rhapsodies over her first baby are nothing to a man’s over his first bicycle. The most remarkable thing about a bicycle is the very unexpected way it has of upsetting a man. A horse generally gives some sort of notice, but a bicycle scorns preliminaries. It simply capsizes him. You see him coming along full sail, using his pocket handkerchief or looking at his watch, to show how perfectly at home he is, and before you have time to blink, rider, machine, and dust are hopelessly mixed up. He extricates himself in a shamefaced kind of way, and wonders how it is that a pretty woman on the sidepath, who took no notice whatever of him when he was in all his glory, takes such an extraordinary interest in him now, and thinks her interest misplaced. I may tell you this for your guidance, that if you want to be bored, really and truly bored, make a third when two cyclists are discussing the merits of their machines and the demerits of other people’s. You can get some fun out of two people from Hobart for the first hour or so, but these men prose away so solemnly, in such deadly earnest, and you have nothing to do but wait, which you do until you are sick and tired of the whole subject. So terribly are you bored that when you go to sleep that night you dream that all the people you have seen during the day are riding furiously round in a circle on bicycles, with Jones standing in the centre, cracking a long whip to make them go faster. Then there are the women cyclists ; they are generally very delicate. They get a machine because the exercise is so good for them, and find themselves “ ever so much better,” they will tell you, and you, if you are of a reflective turn of mind, wonder how it is that women who can ride a bicycle day after day couldn’t treadle a sewing machine for an hour, though to the uninitiated the action seems very much the same. Linda.