Till rascals of "gross ignorance," in foul gregarious pack,
Can no longer safely victimise with quack, quack, quack!
THE LION AT HOME.
The Hope and Pride of the Family (just home from the Grand Tour). "Oh, really, you know, the Men one meets in some of those places out West! I said to myself every night, 'Well, thank heaven I haven't Shot anybody!'"
Fond and Nervous Mother. "You mean, thank Heaven nobody Shot you, don't you, dear?"
A WORD TO THE WISE WHEELMAN.
The Speaker, at Warwick, said that "the bicyclists of the day are debilitating and degenerating the human race by the way in which they stoop over their work." The wheelmen would probably retort that, like Goldsmith's sprightly heroine, they "stoop to conquer." And we are not yet all wheelmen. Still, the Speaker has hit a blot in the contemporary Cyclomania. Few things are more unlovely than the "Bicyclist's Bend." Record-cutting would be purchased dearly at the cost of making men look like camels; and if success on the cinderpath or the road involved giving humanity at large "the hump," one would stigmatise the Cycle Race as the Inhuman Race. Let us hope the Speaker's sharp words will make our stooping cyclists "sit up"—in other than the slangy sense of the phrase.