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Updated: June 7, 2025
The doors and windows of our apartments had been blocked with boxes, bales of cotton, and huge cart-wheels to keep out the irrepressible throng. Our host was agitated to tears; he came out wringing his hands, and urging upon us that any attempt on our part to enter would cause a rush that would break his house down.
By the clear force of genius he had made his way up from that; from throwing cart-wheels for the amusement of the queues waiting at the pit entrances of theaters, from the ribald knock-about of East End halls, from the hilarity of Drury Lane pantomimes. Professionally his success was a solid indubitable thing.
His muscles were rippling smoothly and sleekly under his spare, healthy flesh he had an absurd desire to bound along the street, to run dodging among trees, to tarn "cart-wheels" over soft grass. It was not crisp, but in the air lay a faint suggestion of acerbity, inspirational rather than chilling. "The moon is down I have not heard the clock!"
It was made up of four deep, parallel ruts, the two outermost eroded by years of journeying cart-wheels, the inner ones worn by the companioning hoofs of many a yoke of oxen. Down the centre ran a high and grassy ridge, intolerable to the country parson and the country doctor, compelled to traverse this highway in their one-horse wagons.
Torfrida said humbly that she would try; and walked with the divining-rod between her pretty fingers for many a mile in wood and wold, wherever the ground looked red and rusty. But she never found any iron. "We must take the tires off the cart-wheels," said Leofwin Prat. "But how will the carts do without? For we shall want them if we march."
We were followed about the courts, chapels, and departments of the immense structure by a motley and curious crowd, the girls and women satisfied to watch and stare at us; but the boys had imported a London and Dublin idea: turning cart-wheels, somersaults, and walking all about us on their hands, with feet in the air, to attract attention and elicit pennies.
A lovely evening with the soft hum of village life, the distant tinkling cow-bells, the songs of boys and girls driving them home, far and faint, and now and then the rumbling of cart-wheels on the dusty road.
Well, after all, everything has its fair as well as its seamy side; and truly I do not see why the Baron's boot-jack may not stand as fair in heraldry as the water-buckets, waggons, cart-wheels, plough-socks, shuttles, candlesticks, and other ordinaries, conveying ideas of anything save chivalry, which appear in the arms of some of our most ancient gentry.
It made the farm labourers careless in their work and the bailiff give notice at New Year; it made the mute hard-working animals grow lean, the sheaves disappear from the barn and the corn from the granary; it made off with the reserve cart-wheels and harnesses, pulled the padlocks off the buildings, took planks out of the fences, and on dark nights it swallowed up now a chicken, now even a sheep or a small pig, and sent the servants to the public-house every night.
This he sometimes tries to do; and people who have seen him "turning cart-wheels" along the side of the road have supposed that he was amusing himself, and idling his time; he was only trying to invent a new mode of locomotion, so that he could economize his legs and do his errands with greater dispatch. He practices standing on his head, in order to accustom himself to any position.
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