Vol 2, No 3
Articles in this issue
- Albert S. Parsons's illustrated history of the Massachusetts Bicycle Club, founded January 10, 1879 at the Pope Manufacturing Co.'s rooms, tracing its officers, successive club-rooms, uniforms and road-riding records through the 1882 visit of New York's Citizens' Bicycle Club.
- Charles Richards Dodge's hand-lettered illustrated verse dialogue between a bicycling 'He' and 'She' who meet by chance through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, including an autumn ride with Miss Nellie Clark and Mr. French near a mill.
- Installment (chapters XIV-XVI) of Charles Richards Dodge's serial in which Englishman Wellford Manning is called home to his ailing father's woollen mill and leaves Paris without declaring his love for Ruth Mayne, while Edwin Hoyt courts Ruth and Dr. Mayne grows attached to the artist Grace Thorne at Fontainebleau.
- Edward B. Sturges recounts hiring two decrepit tricycles at Nice in December 1882 and getting lost among walled lanes and gardens while trying to reach Monaco and Monte Carlo along the Corniche Road.
- J. Eunice O'Brien's poem, read at a banquet welcoming home E. B. Sturges, President of the Scranton Bicycle Club, imagining his cycling tour through Ireland, France, the Alps and the Rhine on the way home.
- Paul Pastnor's narrative of two college friends, the narrator and Oscar Redmond, bicycling from Vermont through New Hampshire to the White Mountains, racing a skeptical farmer's wagon and touring Crawford and Franconia Notches before riding the 279 miles home in four days.
- An epistolary story signed 'H. I. N.' in which a quarrelling husband and wife separate for the summer -- she boarding under the name 'Miss Woodbury' and nearly accepting a bicycling suitor's attentions -- before confessing her marriage and reconciling with her husband, Albert.
- Dudley C. Hasbrouck's short poem describing a hidden, moss-and-arbutus nook by a brook that the narrator rides his wheel to each spring, hoping one day not to visit alone.
- President Bates's tall tale of a club run on which members played a prank with fake 'poison' labels on a bottle of wine, terrifying a hostler and sparking a farcical armed pursuit down the road -- offered as the real reason the club has avoided the 'D-- road' ever since.
- A church deacon recounts how their overweight, sedentary new pastor took up a 48-inch bicycle against his advice, rode 250 miles on vacation, lost thirty pounds, and returned healthier, leading the deacon to endorse bicycling for clergymen generally.
- A poem signed 'Retrop.' describing an early-morning twenty-mile bicycle ride out of the city through hill, meadow and farmland, pausing to greet a milkmaid before returning to the smoke-clouded city.
- George E. Blackham, M.D. argues that the bicycle is cheaper, healthier and more convenient than a saddle-horse for a doctor's rounds, comparing exercise benefits and running costs point by point and recommending the tricycle for women and older riders.
- A story signed 'C. K.' in which lawyer Anthony Wright, having sent the sheriff the wrong writ against the Jersey Iron Company, borrows his telegraph-operator friend Joe's bicycle to race thirty miles to Flagtown ahead of rival creditor old Mangle, securing his client's levy first.
- Karl Kron's detailed guide to the macadamized 'coasting' roads of the Newark-Orange 'triangle' and beyond, with mileage and timing notes from his own rides to Morristown, Paterson, Hackensack and Tarrytown, written for wheelmen visiting the 1883 League of American Wheelmen meet in New York.
- Reader letters praising the tricycle and bicycle's health benefits from a Boston literary man, a Massachusetts clergyman and a music professor, plus notes disputing whether the coming New York gathering is the League's third or fourth annual meet and debating Karl Kron's advice on drinking while riding.
- Reader questions and magazine answers covering Thomas Midgley's 179-mile one-day record, a 'marine bicycle' tested in a snow-squall off Lynn, a bicycle-kicking race held by the Portsmouth club, and the Massachusetts Bicycle Club's rules and regulations, printed in full as a model.
- Editorials reviewing the League of American Wheelmen's past year -- its revised constitution, racing rules and amateur definition, new state-division system, and railroad and touring work -- and previewing the season's organized club tours to Maine and Canada.
- A roundup of club and racing news including the Columbia Bicycle Prize Cup rules, arrangements for the fourth League meet's New York parade and banquet, club notices from Bethlehem, Pittsfield and Salem, plus English, French, German and other foreign notes on racing at Leicester, Biarritz and Pau and clubs in Berlin, Vienna, Geneva and Melbourne.
- Reviews of recent books including Thomas Sergeant Perry's "English Literature in the Eighteenth Century," Spurgeon's "Morning by Morning" and "Evening by Evening," a translation of Plato's "Socrates," the "Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson," the "Letters of Lydia Maria Child," Mrs. Carlyle's letters, S. C. Hall's "Retrospect of a Long Life," and Mathilde Blind's "George Eliot."