The second ingredient is a private clown of quaint humour and original ideas. This is the sort of man who finds interest and amusement in everything, and provokes you to laughter by the most unexpected sallies. Before you have had time to turn round he will be on terms of easy familiarity with drivers of coaches, porters at hotels, ladies who serve behind bars, and rustics whom he may meet on the road. In five minutes he knows the details of all their personal history, their length of service, the manner of their work, the size of their families, their adventures, and their chief desires in life. They all treat him with the highest consideration and go out of their way to make things easy for him. At Lynton our own particular clown sent the hotel band into convulsions by dancing a step dance while they were solemnly playing a German march. The incongruity of the situation so tickled the trombone that for at least two minutes he was utterly unable to carry on the pumping operations entailed by his instrument. His ruin was completed when he was asked to join our party with the special object of inflating the back-tyres of our bicycles. Even the conductor relaxed into a smile.
The third ingredient is a paymaster. If you can find a handsome, well-built, agreeable and intellectual man for the position (as we did) so much the better. You will thus add an air of character and distinction to your tour. In that respect, I admit, we were fortunate beyond the average. I need only add, as a slight reminder to my companions, that they have not yet repaid to me the money I disbursed for them.
The fourth ingredient is one rainy day. It helps you to enjoy the fine weather all the more, and it gives you an opportunity of investing yourself in the pretty little gray waterproof cape which bicycle outfitters provide for wet weather. From a ticket attached to the collar of mine, I discovered that it was called an "electric poncho." I can only say that it fully deserved the title. Wet weather, moreover, adds a pleasing element of uncertainty to bicycling by making your back wheel skid, so that you never know, from one moment to the other, what you may be doing. If three of you are riding in a line, it is more than probable that, in the twinkling of an eye, you will be piled three deep on the side of the road.
You ought also to insure at least one hotel dance in the course of your journey. All hotel dances are the same, and therefore one is quite sufficient as a sample. Hotel dances are attended by eight ladies and six men. One of the men is a boy. He has two sisters, who are also present at the dance. He dances three times with one sister, and three times with the other. His seventh dance he devotes to a lady no longer in her first youth, who has captured his young affections, and after the mad excitement of this episode he goes to bed. Another of the men is always elderly, bald and stout. He displays the courtly gallantry which is understood to be an attribute of the old school. He is a rigorous stickler for the etiquette of the ballroom. He dances the Lancers with a solemn precision and the waltz with a precise solemnity, and that is the only distinction he makes between them. He is a great hand at well-turned compliments of a ponderous nature, and it is a liberal education to see him conducting his partner back to her seat. A third man is an amusing rattle. He makes his partners giggle by his total ignorance of the Lancers, and incurs the frowns of the bald man by his dashing exploits in the waltz. The ladies all wear high dresses, they have interchangeable chaperons, and make a noble pretence of enjoying themselves. In the fifth dance the bald man falls down, and long before twelve o'clock everything is over and peace reigns again in the hotel.