THE “BAD BOY’S” FATHER TRIES A BICYCLE.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1137, 9 February 1884, Page 3

THE “BAD BOY’S” FATHER TRIES A BICYCLE.

‘ I should think your pa would learn, after a while, that be is too old to fool around as he did when he was a boy,’ said the grocery man to the ‘ bad boy.’ ‘That’s what I told him when he wanted to try my bicycle,’ said the boy as he broke out laughing; ‘he saw me riding the bicycle, and he said he could do it as well as I could, if he could once get on. I told him he would get hurt, but he said there couldn’t no boy tell him anything about riding, and so we got the bicj 7 cle up against a tree, and he put his feet on the treadles, and told us to turn her loose. Well, honest, I shut my eyes ’cause I didn’t want to see papa get tied up in a knot. But he did. He pushed with one foot, and the bicycle turned sideways ; then he pushed with the other foot, and it began to wriggle ; and then he pushed with both feet, and pulled on the handles, and the front wheel struck an iron fence ; and as pa went on top of the fence the hind wheel seemed to rear up and kick him, and pa hung to the fence and the bicycle hung to him, and they went down on the side walk, the big wheel on pa’s stomach, one handle up his trouser’s leg, the other handle down his coat collar, and the other wheel rolling round back and forth over his fingers, and he yelled to us to take it off. I never saw two people tangled up the way pa and the bicycle was, and we had to take it apart, and take pa’s coat off, and roll up his pants to get him out. And when he got up, and shook himself to sea if he was all there, and looked around and scringed as though he expected the bicycle was going to sneak up behind him and kick him again, he wanted me logo and get the axe to break the bicycle up with, and when I laughed he was going to take me by the neck and maul the bicycle, but I reasoned him out of it. I wasn’t to blame for his trying to gallop over an iron picket fence with a bicycle, ’cause I told him he better keep off of it. I think if men would take advice from boys oftener they wouldn’t be so apt to get their suspenders caught on an iron picket fence aud have to be picked up in a basket. But there is no use of us boys tellin” a grown up person anything, and by keeping still and letting them break their bones, we save getting kicked. It would do some men good to be boys all their lives, then they wouldn’t have to imitate.’ —The Age and London Magpie.