I have only to add that the custodian preserved the inviolability of our umbrellas with honorable fidelity, and that we moistened the drooping clay of our internal tenements at an Aërated Tea Company with a profusion of confectionaries, for which my fair friends with amiable blandness permitted me the privilege of forking out.
V
In which Mr Jabberjee expresses his Opinions on Bicycling as a Pastime.
In consequence of the increasing demands of the incomparable Miss Jessimina upon the dancing attendance of your humble servant, I am lately become as idle as a newly painted ship, and have not drunk in the legal wisdom of the learned Moonshees who lecture in the hall of my Inn of Court, or opened the ponderous treatise of Hon'ble Justice Blackstone or Addison on Torts, for many a blank day.
Still, as Philosopher Plato observed, "Nihil humani alienum a me puto," and my time has not been actually squandered in the theft of Procrastination, but rather employed in the proper study of Mankind, and acquiring a more complete knowingness in Ars Vivendi.
So I think it worth to direct public attention to the dangers of a practice which threatens to develop into an epidemical kind of plague, and carry the deteriorating trails of a serpent over our household families, unless promptly scotched by benevolent firmness of a paternal Government.
Need I explain I am alluding to the nowaday passion for propelling oneself at a severe speed by dint of unstable and most precarious machinery? It is now the exception which breaks the rule to take the air in the streets without being startled by the unseemly spectacles of go-ahead citizens straddled upon such revolutionary contrivances, threading their way with breakneck velocity under the very noses of omnibus and other horses, and ringing the shrill welkin of a tintinnabulating gong!
Nay, even after the Curfew has taken its toll from the knell of parting day, and darkness reigns supreme, they will urge on their wild career, illuminated by the dim religious light of a small oil lamp!