off as you would from a
horse. It certainly does sound exceedingly easy; but it isn't. I don't
know why it isn't but it isn't. Try as you may, you don't get down as
you would from a horse, you get down as you would from a house afire.
You make a spectacle of yourself every time.

II

During the eight days I took a daily lesson an hour and a half. At the
end of this twelve working-hours' apprenticeship I was graduated--in
the rough. I was pronounced competent to paddle my own bicycle without
outside help. It seems incredible, this celerity of acquirement. It
takes considerably longer than that to learn horseback-riding in the
rough.

Now it is true that I could have learned without a teacher, but it
would have been risky for me, because of my natural clumsiness. The
self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know
a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers;
and, besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless
people into going and doing as he himself has done. There are those who
imagine that the unlucky accidents of life--life's "experiences"--are in
some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never knew one of
them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch
you on your inexperienced side. If personal experience can be worth
anything as an education, it wouldn't seem likely that you could trip
Methuselah; and yet if that old person could come back here it is more
that likely that one of the first things he would do would be to take
hold of one of these electric wires and tie himself all up in a knot.
Now the surer thing and the wiser thing would be for him to ask 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 wou