d that my dear little uncle
had such a thing as a Past.

ON A TRICYCLE

I sat on the parapet of the bridge, and swung my feet over the water
that frothed and fretted at the central pier below. Above the bridge
the stream broadened into a cress-bespangled pool, over which the
sapphire dragon-flies hovered, and its earlier course was hidden by the
big oak trees that bent towards each other from either bank. Through
their speckled tracery of green one saw the hazy blue depths of the
further forest. I was watching the proceedings of some quick-moving
brown bird amid the rushes and marsh marigolds of the opposite bank.

"Pleasant," said a voice beside me.

I turned, and saw my uncle. He was disguised in a costume of
reddish-brown cloth. "Golf here?" said I, and then I noticed the
tricycle. "A vagrom man on wheels!"

Both the suit and the machine became him very well. The machine was
low, and singularly broad between the wheels, and altogether equal to
him, and it had chubby pneumatic tires and a broad and even imposing
wallet.

"Yes," said he, following my eye. "It is a handsome machine, a full
dress concern with all its plating and brown leather, and in use it is
as willing and quiet as any tricycle could be, a most urbane and
gentlemanly affair--if you will pardon the adjective. I am glad these
things have not come too late for me. Frankly, the bicycle is
altogether too flippant for a man of my age, and the tricycle hitherto,
with its two larger wheels behind and a smaller one in front, has been
so indecently suggestive of a perambulator that really, George, I could
not bring myself to it. But a Bishop might ride _that_ thing."

He swung himself up upon the parapet beside me and lit a cigar.

"The bicycle for boys, George--or fools. The things will not keep up
for a moment without you work at them, they need constant attention; I
would as soon ride a treadmill. You cannot loaf with them, and the
only true pleasure of cycling is to loaf. Yet only this morning did I
meet an elderly gentleman with a beard fit for Abraham, his face all
crimson and deliquescent with heat, and all distorted with the fury of
his haste, toiling up a hill on one of these unstable instruments.
When he saw me coming down in all my ease and dignity he damned at me
with his bell. Now, I do not like to see a bicycle wobble under a load
of years, and steer into the irascible. As years increase tempers
shorten, and bicycles