“Didn’t we say we would come out in style when we got a good ready?” said Arthur, as he and his companions dismounted at the post-office after seeing the girls home. “I felt a little nervous at first, but I am all right for the future. Of course I expect to get some falls, but this day’s experience has satisfied me that I can stay in the saddle if I only keep my wits about me.”
The ice having been broken, so to speak, the boys no longer kept behind the evergreens, but appeared upon the streets every day and enjoyed many a pleasant run. Their wheels proved to be so very accommodating and so easily managed that they wondered they had ever been afraid of them. Of course they began to try tricks. They wouldn’t have been live boys if they had not. First, they practiced at making their wheels stand perfectly still; and when they could do that they tried something else. Of course they subscribed for wheelmen’s journals, and in one of them read of a rider who could bring his wheel to a stop, get out of his saddle, open his lamp which he had previously lighted, ignite his cigar, close the lamp and mount again without ever touching the ground or tipping his machine over. They had any number of such examples which they regarded as well worthy of emulation, and Uncle Joe was heard to declare that it was as good as a circus to stand at one of the windows and watch the performances that went on in his brother’s back yard.
You may be sure that these three boys did not long remain alone in their glory. Other wheels of different patterns began making their appearance, and one day Tom Bigden and his cousins rode gaily through the village, clad in a uniform of their own invention, and which, it is needless to say, was entirely different from the one adopted by Joe Wayring and his chums. Did this mean that there were to be other rival organizations in town? It looked like it. Every body talked wheel; and the boy who didn’t have one was going to get it just as soon as he could make up his mind which was the best. Canoe literature went out of fashion. The Amateur Athlete and L. A. W. Bulletin were the only papers that were worth reading, and songs of the wheel were the only songs that were worth singing. Even on the school-ground, or when the players were taking their positions in a game of ball, it was no uncommon thing to hear some fellow strike up:
“Away we go on our wheels, boys,
As free as the morning breeze;
And over our pathway steals, boys,
The music of wind-swept trees.
And ’round by the woods and over the hill,
Where the ground so gently swells,
From a dozen throats in echoing notes