Bassett's Scrap Book, Vol 2, No 6
Articles in this issue
- A light August poem in which the stay-at-home narrator passes the hot days courting his sweetheart Dolly beneath her silken parasol.
- The issue's running miscellany of facts and anecdotes, including the romantic secret burials of Alaric, Attila the Hun and Fernando de Soto, the origin of the 'buck-board', and a Scottish chairman's rambling toast to the Queen.
- A long feature of riddles, charades, catch arithmetic and classic paradoxes, including the Liar paradox, Achilles and the tortoise, the Bishop of Oxford's body riddle, and Macaulay's 'Cod' charade.
- A dialect poem by Joe Lincoln in which a countryman explains he prefers his small-town weekly's local gossip to the city dailies' crime and foreign news.
- The reader question-and-answer department, covering the meaning of whiskey 'proof', the definition of a free thinker, the poem 'Sleep sweetly in this quiet room' by Mrs. Ellen M. H. Gates, the Shipka Pass in the Turko-Russian war, Sydney Smith's 'Who reads an American book?', the 'yellow peril', and the 1835 Concord mob attack on Whittier.
- A reform-minded poem rejecting old themes of art in favour of singing the rights of man, liberty, universal brotherhood and a coming better age for all mankind.
- The League of American Wheelmen's official department listing the association's objects, its officers (President Geo. L. Cooke, Secretary-Treasurer Abbot Bassett, et al.), standing committees, dues, and membership rules for Veterans and Pioneers.
- An essay by League President Geo. L. Cooke describing twenty-five summers spent at Onset, Massachusetts, and how taking his bicycle there since 1888 taught him what the League of American Wheelmen has accomplished.
- Editorial news notes from Secretary-Treasurer Bassett: a Boston fire that nearly burned out the League building, the proposed automobile section of the L.A.W., Boston cyclers' long riding records (Quincy Kilby having ridden in every town of Massachusetts), and the etymology of 'coasting' and new motoring nomenclature.
- A moralising editorial comparing riding a bicycle to the conduct of life, arguing that success needs 'elbow grease', good steering, brakes (temperance and self-restraint), one's kit of moral tools, and eternal vigilance against the scorchers of life's highway.