his bones. I only
know that I tried it myself, and that to a man who wore flesh it was
agony. Every time you went over a stone or a rut it nipped you; it was
like riding on an irritable lobster. You rode that for a month."

"I thought it only right to give it a fair trial," he answered.

I said: "You gave your family a fair trial also; if you will allow me the
use of slang. Your wife told me that never in the whole course of your
married life had she known you so bad tempered, so un-Christian like, as
you were that month. Then you remember that other saddle, the one with
the spring under it."

He said: "You mean 'the Spiral.'"

I said: "I mean the one that jerked you up and down like a Jack-in-the-
box; sometimes you came down again in the right place, and sometimes you
didn't. I am not referring to these matters merely to recall painful
memories, but I want to impress you with the folly of trying experiments
at your time of life."

He said. "I wish you wouldn't harp so much on my age. A man at thirty-
four--"

"A man at what?"

He said: "If you don't want the thing, don't have it. If your machine
runs away with you down a mountain, and you and George get flung through
a church roof, don't blame me."

"I cannot promise for George," I said; "a little thing will sometimes
irritate him, as you know. If such an accident as you suggest happen, he
may be cross, but I will undertake to explain to him that it was not your
fault."

"Is the thing all right?" he asked.

"The tandem," I replied, "is well."

He said: "Have you overhauled it?"

I said: "I have not, nor is anyone else going to overhaul it. The thing
is now in working order, and it is going to remain in working order till
we start."

I have had experience of this "overhauling." There was a man at
Folkestone; I used to meet him on the Lees. He proposed one evening we
should go for a long bicycle ride together on the following day, and I
agreed. I got up early, for me; I made an effort, and was pleased with
myself. He came half an hour late: I was waiting for him in the garden.
It was a lovely day. He said:--

"That's a good-looking machine of yours. How does it run?"

"Oh, like most of them!" I answered; "easily enough in the morning; goes
a little stiffly after lunch."

He caught hold of it by the front wheel and the fork and shook it
violently.

I said: "Don't do that; you'll hurt it."

I did not see why he should shake it; it