ld make up-hill wheeling pretty
difficult for me at first; but he also said the bicycle would soon
remove it. The contrast between his muscles and mine was quite marked.
He wanted to test mine, so I offered my biceps--which was my best. It
almost made him smile. He said, "It is pulpy, and soft, and yielding,
and rounded; it evades pressure, and glides from under the fingers; in
the dark a body might think it was an oyster in a rag." Perhaps this
made me look grieved, for he added, briskly: "Oh, that's all right, you
needn't worry about that; in a little while you can't tell it from a
petrified kidney. Just go right along with your practice; you're all
right."

Then he left me, and I started out alone to seek adventures. You don't
really have to seek them--that is nothing but a phrase--they come to
you.

I chose a reposeful Sabbath-day sort of a back street which was about
thirty yards wide between the curbstones. I knew it was not wide enough;
still, I thought that by keeping strict watch and wasting no space
unnecessarily I could crowd through.

Of course I had trouble mounting the machine, entirely on my own
responsibility, with no encouraging moral support from the outside,
no sympathetic instructor to say, "Good! now you're doing well--good
again--don't hurry--there, now, you're all right--brace up, go ahead."
In place of this I had some other support. This was a boy, who was
perched on a gate-post munching a hunk of maple sugar.

He was full of interest and comment. The first time I failed and went
down he said that if he was me he would dress up in pillows, that's what
he would do. The next time I went down he advised me to go and learn
to ride a tricycle first. The third time I collapsed he said he didn't
believe I could stay on a horse-car. But the next time I succeeded, and
got clumsily under way in a weaving, tottering, uncertain fashion, and
occupying pretty much all of the street. My slow and lumbering gait
filled the boy to the chin with scorn, and he sung out, "My, but don't
he rip along!" Then he got down from his post and loafed along the
sidewalk, still observing and occasionally commenting. Presently he
dropped into my wake and followed along behind. A little girl passed
by, balancing a wash-board on her head, and giggled, and seemed about to
make a remark, but the boy said, rebukingly, "Let him alone, he's going
to a funeral."

I have been familiar with that street for years, and had always supp