end, instead of going fast,
began to go very slow; then he stopped; then he got out. Then he said,
"And I left the Stepney behind."

The grey moths came out of the wood and the yellow stars came out to
crown it, as my friend, with the lucidity of despair, explained to me
(on the soundest scientific principles, of course) that nothing would be
any good at all. We must sleep the night in the lane, except in the very
unlikely event of some one coming by to carry a message to some town.
Twice I thought I heard some tiny sound of such approach, and it died
away like wind in the trees, and the motorist was already asleep when
I heard it renewed and realized. Something certainly was approaching.
I ran up the road--and there it was. Yes, It--and She. Thrice had she
come, once comic and once tragic and once heroic. And when she came
again it was as if in pardon on a pure errand of prosaic pity and
relief. I am quite serious. I do not want you to laugh. It is not the
first time a donkey has been received seriously, nor one riding a donkey
with respect.

The Wheel

In a quiet and rustic though fairly famous church in my neighbourhood
there is a window supposed to represent an Angel on a Bicycle. It does
definitely and indisputably represent a nude youth sitting on a wheel;
but there is enough complication in the wheel and sanctity (I suppose)
in the youth to warrant this working description. It is a thing of
florid Renascence outline, and belongs to the highly pagan period which
introduced all sorts of objects into ornament: personally I can believe
in the bicycle more than in the angel. Men, they say, are now imitating
angels; in their flying-machines, that is: not in any other respect that
I have heard of. So perhaps the angel on the bicycle (if he is an angel
and if it is a bicycle) was avenging himself by imitating man. If so, he
showed that high order of intellect which is attributed to angels in the
mediaeval books, though not always (perhaps) in the mediaeval pictures.

For wheels are the mark of a man quite as much as wings are the mark of
an angel. Wheels are the things that are as old as mankind and yet are
strictly peculiar to man, that are prehistoric but not pre-human.

A distinguished psychologist, who is well acquainted with physiology,
has told me that parts of himself are certainly levers, while other
parts are probably pulleys, but that after feeling himself carefully all
over, he cannot find a wheel a