This is worth a little practice, as correctly done the skirt needs no arrangement with the hand, and the mount is certainly quicker and more graceful than any other.
Is somewhat similar, but is done while the machine is in motion, and is therefore pre-eminently the mount for busy thoroughfares.
Walking on the left of the machine, give a quick hop with the right foot, placing the left on the pedal when in any position, then a sudden pull on the handles, will lift one forward on to the saddle without checking the motion of the machine.
This is a most useful mount for traffic and for all occasions where a quick mount is necessary. It will probably require considerable practice to accomplish successfully, but the feeling of complete mastery it gives one over the machine is worth some little trouble to acquire, and when the feat is accomplished, I think you will look back on the learning of a new method of mounting as another pleasure added to the many enjoyments of cycling.
He had let love and life slip past him, and now he lay a-dying, and love and life lay behind him for evermore.
Lying in his narrow bed, in the room which in all his days of grinding work, he had never troubled to make homelike or comfortable, his thoughts wandered back over the years with wearisome persistency. He had been a successful man. The name of John Saunders was known far and wide as the name of the shrewdest solicitor of his day; hard-headed, keen, practical--feared by friend and enemy alike; loved, men said, by none.
They called him "old Dryasdust" in his own office; they declared that his heart had withered away in the atmosphere of work and in the squirrel round of business in which he had lived. Some, indeed, went so far as to say that Nature had never provided him with a heart at all.
And now he lay dying--a lonely man, in his lonely chambers, looking wearily back across his life.
His grey head moved uneasily upon the pillows, arranged by his valet into clumsy discomfort; his eyes glanced restlessly round the room, turning almost impatiently from its severe dreariness, towards the window, through which he could just see a glimpse of a tree-top in the square garden.
He was tired, most dreadfully tired. It was a weariness to think, yet the busy brain, that in all his busy life had never learnt to rest, refused now to be stilled. Thick and fast there crowded before his mind memories of long forgotten cases, recollections of clients long since dead, worrying details of business, that had long ago been settled and done with.
