I said: "We will not go into details; the picture always seemed to me
indelicate."

He said: "Medically speaking, it was right."

"Possibly," I said, "for a man who rode in nothing but his bones. I only
know that I tried it myself, and that to a man who wore flesh it was
agony. Every time you went over a stone or a rut it nipped you; it was
like riding on an irritable lobster. You rode that for a month."

"I thought it only right to give it a fair trial," he answered.

I said: "You gave your family a fair trial also; if you will allow me the
use of slang. Your wife told me that never in the whole course of your
married life had she known you so bad tempered, so un-Christian like, as
you were that month. Then you remember that other saddle, the one with
the spring under it."

He said: "You mean 'the Spiral.'"

I said: "I mean the one that jerked you up and down like a Jack-in-the-
box; sometimes you came down again in the right place, and sometimes you
didn't. I am not referring to these matters merely to recall painful
memories, but I want to impress you with the folly of trying experiments
at your time of life."

He said. "I wish you wouldn't harp so much on my age. A man at thirty-
four--"