into such a dreadful condition. One might fancy that he had been
sitting with his nether extremities in some complicated
machinery, a threshing-machine, say, or one of those hay-making
furies. But Sherlock Holmes (now happily dead) would have fancied
nothing of the kind. He would have recognised at once that the
bruises on the internal aspect of the left leg, considered in the
light of the distribution of the other abrasions and contusions,
pointed unmistakably to the violent impact of the Mounting
Beginner upon the bicycling saddle, and that the ruinous state of
the right knee was equally eloquent of the concussions attendant
on that person's hasty, frequently causeless, and invariably ill-
conceived descents. One large bruise on the shin is even more
characteristic of the 'prentice cyclist, for upon every one of
them waits the jest of the unexpected treadle. You try at least
to walk your machine in an easy manner, and whack!--you are
rubbing your shin. So out of innocence we ripen. Two bruises on
that place mark a certain want of aptitude in learning, such as
one might expect in a person unused to muscular exercise.
Blisters on the hands are eloquent of the nervous clutch of the
wavering rider. And so forth, until Sherlock is presently
explaining, by the help of the minor injuries, that the machine
ridden is an old-fashioned affair with a fork instead of the
diamond frame, a cushioned tire, well worn on the hind wheel, and
a gross weight all on of perhaps three-and-forty pounds.

The revelation is made. Behind the decorous figure of the
attentive shopman that I had the honour of showing you at first,
rises a vision of a nightly struggle, of two dark figures and a
machine in a dark road,--the road, to be explicit, from
Roehampton to Putney Hill,--and with this vision is the sound of