ur is over and all the things are done. But women
are born wise."

"By the bye," said I, "how is Mrs Harborough?"

"Very well, thanks. How is Euphemia? Your bit of view, George, is
pretty, but I think I will have some heather now. There is a common
three miles ahead. This indeed is the true merit of cycling. For a
view, a panorama; for one picture, a gallery. Your true artist in
cycling sits by the roadside, and rides only by way of an interlude.
As for the worship of the machine, I would as soon worship a
scene-shifter."

He dropped off the bridge and mounted his machine, and was presently
pursuing his smooth and noiseless way. As he vanished round the corner
he sounded his gong. It was really a most potent, grave, and reverend
gong, with a certain note of philosophical melancholy in its tone, as
different from the vulgar tang of your common cycle as one can well
imagine. It asked you, at your convenience, sir (or madam), to get out
of the way, to stand aside and see a most worthy and dignified
spectacle roll by, if so be you had the mind for it. As for any
scolding insistence, any threat of imminent collision, there was none
of it. It was the bell of a man who loved margins, who was at his
ease, and would have all the world at its ease. More than anything
else, it reminded me of the boom of some ivy-clad church tower, warning
the world without unseemly haste that another hour had, with leisurely
completeness, accomplished itself.

And so he passed out of my sight and was gone.

AN UNSUSPECTED MASTERPIECE

(AUTHORESS UNKNOWN)

He pushed it away from him.

"I felt as though I had disturbed the graves of the long departed," he
said with a grimace, and then addressing the egg: "Forgive me the
sacrilege: they sold you to me as new laid, a mere thing of yesterday.
I had no idea I was opening the immemorial past. _De mortuis nihil
nisi bonum_--to you at least the quotation will be novel. Or I might
call you bad, you poor mummy.

"Unhappy, pent-up, ineffectual thing!" he said, waving his jilted bread
and butter, and addressing the discarded inedible. "Poor old maid
among eggs! And so it has come to this absolute failure with you. Why
were you ever laid? Surely, since you were once alive, some lurking
aspiration, some lowly, and yet not lowly, but most divine, striving
towards the Higher and the Better, hath stirred within you. The warm
sunlight shone through your translucent shell, the sw