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"Well, we can try that," answered Pepper. Trundling their bicycles, they hurried along the country road until they reached a farmhouse. "Looks as if they were all out or gone to bed," was Jack's comment, for not a light showed about the place. "We'll soon know," returned Pepper, and he pounded lustily on the front door. There was no answer to this summons, and he pounded again.

The upper classes also affect polo, tennis, and croquet, and go in a good deal for gymnastics, fencing, and fives. Cycling does not appear to commend itself greatly to the Spanish idea of recreation. Bicycles are, of course, to be seen in the large and more modern towns, but they are never very numerous, and as far as ladies are concerned, may be said to have made no way.

Thence he drove through miles and miles of orange groves, so large that the numerous workmen go about their work on bicycles. Even here in the country, the roadsides were planted with palms and other ornamental trees, and gay with flowers.

Even if we take some specific branch of all this huge mass of new employment the coming of mechanism has brought with it, we still find an undigested miscellany. Consider the rude levy that is engaged in supplying and repairing the world's new need of bicycles!

"We must have the moon!" said Erebus with cold scorn. "Bicycles aren't so far away," said the Terror sagely. They moved swiftly across the common. Erebus poured forth a long monotonous complaint about the lack of bicycles, which, for them, made this Cosmic All a mere time-honored cheat.

You felt you were intruding; that you were a mere gross interloper, coming through curiosity, that was not excused by the compunction you felt, to see the appearance of a place that had tragedy in nearly all its homes. Young men streamed by on bicycles in the same direction, groups were hurrying there on foot.

Osbourne close in our wake on bicycles, at a sudden turn in the road we found ourselves mixed with a remarkable native procession, with a somewhat primitive band of music, in front of us, while behind was a festival or a funeral, we could not tell which. Several of the stoutest men carried bales and bundles on poles. Some were evidently bales of tapa-cloth.

Several times I was arrested in this way and never escaped the little frousse which came to me when these dark figures closed upon me, as they leapt from their bicycles and said with grim suspicion: "Vos papiers, s'il vous plait!" My pockets were bulging with papers, which I thrust hurriedly into the lantern-light for a close-eyed scrutiny.

There are nine million seven hundred and eighty nine thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that have not flown three yards and seven inches. But what of it? Why count them up? Why bother about them? The important, conclusive, massive, irresistible, crushing, material fact is that one bicycle has flown three yards seven inches.

In the cellar with the hogsheads, or in the attic with the maid? or in our own room? Tell me where we could have put him! Or perhaps they will say that he slept on the ceiling, like the flies? They will say anything, chattering, chattering, and coming here with their questions and their photographing machines, and their bicycles, and the souls of their dead!