an announcement to be able to make that the man and the book have at last been discovered. But so it is, as I think that all readers of Mr Allen's recently appeared Wheel Magic' will agree with me in concluding. A little book of a couple of hundred pages all told, which will go into a pocket (5 inches x 3 inches inch), has for the first time definitely savoured and appraised the mood of the joyous cyclist. The scientific critics, the austere commentators of the Cycling Tourists' Club Gazette, have already hailed it from afar as an undoubted first attempt to express the aspirations, the humour and philosophy, of the wheelman in a form compatible with the severe limitations of Belles Lettres. An Izaak Walton of cycling at best would probably be an chronism; but what Robert Louis Stevenson achieved for donkey travel and canotage, that it may fairly be contended that Mr Allen has attempted with equal success for the man whose music is to be found in the hum o' the wheel. Such light freightage is inadequate, of course, as our philosopher himself observes. "How feebly do these essays reflect the delight I have found on the road." That joy, like all the things that are really worth communicating, is incommunicable by mere words. And yet it all seems so simple. "I hear the sirens singing. I ride

ana

"Once upon a time, on a July day, I rode from Winchester by Romsey through the New Forest to Wimborne. It was one of those days on which even the unworthy may enter a temporary heaven. For the time I attained the bliss of the perfect cyclist.

ing spirit, full of eyes, like the beast "The perfect cyclist is a wander

His

in the Revelation. All the burden of humanity falls from him as he mounts. He has no past, neither does his future extend beyond the the next turning, it is to the crownflying day. If he looks at all beyond ing satisfaction of supper. For him one lane is enough at a time. His is the zenith of optimism. The flower by the wayside is for him the sweetness of the world made visible. easy downward glide is the very movement of life. Sorrow and pain are far-off accidental things, as irrelhis wheels have left behind. evant as death. All toil and vanity abodes of poverty are bright with his happiness. A puncture, a patch of stones in the roadway, a dust-compelling motor, these are the worst of life's troubles. The goodness of God is manifest in the sunshine.

The

"To some such mood I attained that day. that day. Coming to Stony Cross, I turned aside for the sake of the round by Lyndhurst and Emery Down, returning to the road I had left near Picket Post. Riding slowly through the bowery woodland, life seemed a simple thing. If only men would cease to worry themselves

about things of no importance, how

easy it would all be ! Food and shelter and some sort of clothing

cannot be foregone; but after these what more does a man need than the visible beauty of the world? The luxuries of Art, the luxury of Literature, seemed no less superfluous than purple raiment and sumptuous fare. In a right-minded society every man would be his own poet.

"The woods were murmurous with life, lively with bird-cries and flit tings. At one point, where the forest opened a glade on my left, I perceived, for the first time in my life, a living pair of White Admiral butterflies. I felt as I dismounted hastily something of the thrill with which as a boy I should have beheld these rarities. But as a boy I was a 'collector' of such beings, and used to kill them and 'set' them with pins on cork, and regard them as 'specimens.' Specimens they were of the human power of transforming beauty into hideousness. The two little fairies were dancing about a clump of trees. In their manner of flight there was none of the labouring, uncertain flutter of the Whites, nor the jerkiness of the Blues, or the fussiness of the Skippers. Not so strong as the flight of the Red Admiral, theirs was more daintily graceful. Certain of themselves, they rose or sank at will, they floated about the tree-tops, they glided almost to the ground on long sweeping curves down the steeps of air, with hardly a beat of wings. There are, naturally, no human words expressive of such motion. Passing and repassing continually, they would suddenly, now and again, whirl round each other so quickly that when, in an instant, they had separated one could not tell which had been which. Sometimes that little whirligig turned into a chase, and with flashing, effort less twists and turns they would follow each other for a space closely about the branches. For half an hour I watched them, and the cup of life brimmed over at my lips. I perceived the perfect fitness of things. There was no need, I saw, to qualify my gladness with an 'if.' Life must need be beautiful in a world where every woodland glade holds such wonders. Those who do not feel it so can hardly be said to be alive.

"Later, after some hard riding in the heat, I set foot at a wayside public-house for a long draught of beer. No one but a cyclist or a serious walker quite knows the quality of beer. It was a glorious moment, that in which I held to my lips the frothy tankard. And who but a solitary cyclist or a solitary walker knows quite such moments? He is hot, he is dusty, he is, perhaps, a little fatigued. But he is mellow and strong as his liquor: he is powerful and free. He is no struggler for existence, but has a lien on the solid earth and stands upon it squarely with a sense of possession. He is above human weakness and knows himself immortal. Speak to him of teetotallers and he will burst out laughing.

"Later still, when the shadows had grown long, I entered a vague and vast contentment. The trivial round, the common task, were as things that were not for me. The business I had left, my cares and worries, my ambitions, I saw them at a vast distance as trivial and absurd things to obscure my vision, to come between my soul and the. world? And it was not only my own affairs that I thought thus of. All the anxieties and sorrows, all the toil and pain and disappointment of other people's lives, seemed to me equally trivial. It is our pettiness, our vanity, our piggishness and dulness that work all the mischief. Why all this fuss about betterment and progress, all this political outcry, this socialism and what not? It is all a pursuit of things that don't matter. It is all a fuss about nothing. Why all this din about education? Life is good and there's an end of it. We have only to live. We have only to open our eyes. If a man is not happy and interested in this wonderful world, how do you propose to better his condition? There is but one way of salvation."

This may be inadequate to express the writer's feelings, but I do not think that its inadequacy will be the im

pression uppermost in the mind of the casual reader. "One does one's best and one fails. One achieves failure. But the experience remains: the vision one has had; the revelation one does not forget. Success is of the body. But far too much is talked of success and its factors, and of success that crowns a life or a work. There is no such thing as success. "No man ever succeeded in doing anything worth doing. The greatest artists know this best." For the present, after reading the passage cited, we are satisfied with Mr Allen's attempts to give expression to the joy that wells up from the heart that knows what it is to wander on wheels; and one's reflections upon the muteness of cycling as a pastime will need modification more and more as one peruses the great variety which is contained within the dozen papers of this little volume.

Mr Allen is certainly a certainly a cheerful philosopher. Like Dr Like Dr Johnson's old college acquaintance, Oliver Edwards, he finds cheerfulness constantly and irresistibly breaking in. There are many dangers lying in wait for the wheelman. Every

rider knows a road-reach or two which he regards, with a kind of superstition, as unlucky, places that need special care, quite apart from the bits of glass, rusty nails, greasy patches, drunken carters, and wanton automobiles that are

in ambush for all. To write faithfully and with magisterial

fulness and philosophy of the causes, qualities, and consequences of the accidents that befall those who trust themselves on bicycles were to fill a volume with sad presages. A vivid picture is presented to us in Wheel Magic' of the revolting suddenness and unexpectedness of the common fall, whereby we leave our machines abruptly and in disorder, senselessly wooing our mother-earth. "The misused machine lies prone. The grit is biting my mouth. I prize myself up and give three rapid leaps of intense pain, obliquely, so as to fall again, if need be, upon the long grass by the wayside." Yet compensation and refreshment are drawn by way of moral even from the changes and chances of our transitory equilibrium.

Our

"One of the finest qualities of cycling is just that it involves an element ordinary comings and goings are of difficulty and even danger. sadly lacking in this ingredient of happiness. There is a certain danger in railway travelling; but on the railway, so far as you are personally concerned, you are almost completely at the mercy of brute chance. On a bicycle it is your own skill and coolness and power that must overcome difficulties and carry you in safety. You are braced not only to energy, but to prudence and foresight and a

nice balance. Your motion demands not mere muscular exertion, but an exertion of mind, an alertness and

resource, that gives you, in fruition, a sense of complex difficulties overcome. And anything that happens amiss, unless the results be very serious, is only a new incentive. If you cannot repair the damage yourself you must find your repairer. You must perhaps walk some miles. You are in doubt as to whether it

will now be possible to reach your determined end. You are defeated this time; and you have the pleasure of devising what is best now to do. You discover that happiness consists not in doing what you intended, but in doing something. Perhaps you have fallen into a ditch, and are all over mud, and acutely conscious of folly. Shake off quickly that sense of humiliation, and cease to be a rebel against facts! You are a fool what of it? Did you not know that before? Regard yourself as fallen on a battlefield, and rejoice that you live to fight still. Those

one

mud stains are the marks victorious Nature has set on you for your folly, visible as such to all. But she overcomes us all, sooner or later. Rejoice that this time her marks will brush off. Shake yourself like a man and go forward. Before long you will be looking back tenderly on this discomfort. It has been so before. Are not all the rides on which something of this kind has fallen marked with red letters in your memory, as days of pleasant adventure? So it will be now. The world is still before you. If not to the haven you foresaw at starting, yet to one inn or another you will come at last. And there, with all the more zest because of this mishap, with a sense that you have wrested victory from defeat and plucked up drowned honour by the locks, you will regale yourself and take your ease, and all that is now dark will be lightened, all that is now pain will be peace."

One more touch of our wheel-magician's philosophy and we shall have done with our borrowings. They have already sufficed to show that Mr Allen has a nervous style, a logical consistency, a pleasant fancy, and a rambling "cosmogony" of his own. He has

known how to console those who fall by the wayside. But there are other impediments which loom large sometimes in the imaginations of those whose

legitimate ambition it is to travel fast and far. A faraway goal is an object of real desire; and desire is life. To start early and catch the world dreaming, to traverse four or five separate zones of scenic England, to run one's course like the sun-such thoughts make a temporary god of the strenuous wheelman, who reels fifty or sixty miles from his wheel without knowing it.

The

"The first fifty miles or so go with a snap. After that, I find, there is a change. The aspect of things slowly becomes forbidding. dust gets vicious; the heat becomes a weight on one's back. A certain mental weariness is apparent before the muscles feel it. The machine wants oil; the baggage is working loose. Even to the longest distance rider there comes, I imagine, a time when the wheels begin to drag and the innervation of muscle falls on the conscious will. Gradually the joy fades out of our riding. Then comes a struggle, at first stimulating, then exasperating, finally grim.

"I remember how soon it was after the triumphant reading of my cyclometer that that change began. The stopping for that steep little slope must, I think, have been ominous. Yet for the next thirty miles, though the pace fell off a little and I felt a tug, there was no painful strain. It was a case of increasing, but of continuously victorious effort. And then, just beyond Ipswich and going north, my whole body, quite suddenly, became a dead-weight. It was extraordinarily sudden, that change; it occurred within a space of about was thrusting along with a sense of two hundred yards. One moment weight overcome, and a few minutes later my muscles, with one accord, struck. I did not even attempt a struggle. It was as though a vast weight from somewhere had suddenly and quietly settled on my shoulders. I had to dismount, because the machine stopped. I walked straight