Vol 2, No 5
Articles in this issue
- L. W. Seely's account of a roughly 500-mile bicycle tour by three Capital Bicycle Club members of Washington, Max Hansmann, Clarence G. Allen, and Seely himself, from Washington through the Shenandoah Valley to Luray Cave and the Natural Bridge, Virginia, in August-September 1882.
- James Clarence Harvey's poem on the joys of riding at dusk, as sunset gives way to moonrise and a wheelman sings on his homeward way.
- P. De Villers continues his history of French bicycle racing from the 1870 war's aftermath through the 1873 international races at Lyons, where Moore of Paris and John Keen of England competed against C. Thuillet.
- E. H. Burn of the Dunedin Bicycle Club surveys cycling clubs across Otago and Canterbury since 1879, including the Pioneer and Christ Church clubs and the newly formed New Zealand Cyclists' Alliance.
- 'Onesimus's' comic narrative poem about Deacon Gummidge, who denounces his minister's bicycle-riding as ungodly, then secretly buys and learns to ride a machine himself, ending with a moonlit collision with his own pastor.
- A. L. Fennessy's illustrated history of the Springfield Bicycle Club from its 1880 founding by five young men through its 1882 tournament and new club-rooms in the Massachusetts Life Insurance building, noting racer Geo. M. Hendee and preparations for the club's 1883 Springfield meet.
- Four numbered songs on the pleasures of an evening ride, 'Wheels,' 'Night Lights,' 'On the Road,' and 'Souvenir' (the last signed Ninon Neckar), celebrating the wheel's escape from the city.
- Dudley C. Hasbrouck's rondeau describing a tricyclist watching 'Marguerite' on her shady porch after a ride together.
- Installment (chapters XX-XXI) of Charles Richards Dodge's serial: as the touring party visits the Rhine, Cologne and Heidelberg, Doctor Mayne presses his suit with artist Grace Thorne, while Wellford Manning, delayed in England by his father's death, learns from Professor Gantier that Edwin Hoyt is courting Ruth Mayne and returns to Paris just as the party sails for America.
- A short ballad signed 'G. & C.' of a lady watching from her casement for a lover who arrives, in the poem's twist, as a wheelman thrown into a brook by moonlight.
- Charles Richards Dodge's poem on the quiet gladness of an evening bicycle ride as night falls and the whip-poor-will calls.
- Four physicians endorse the bicycle and tricycle for health and professional practice: George E. Blackham of Dunkirk, N.Y. ('The Bicycle and Tricycle as Aids to Health and Recreation'), G. E. Corbin of St. Johns, Mich., Charles A. Kinch of New York, and Baldwin of Columbus, Ohio, the last citing case reports of two young men restored to health by riding.
- Reader contributions including 'A Sportsman's Studio' (a tour of author Thomas Sedgwick Steele's camp-and-canoe sanctum), a comic tale of two Philadelphia novices' first road ride, a reprinted St. Louis Globe-Democrat jab at wheelmen's parades, an essay on Sabbath cycling, Ninon Neckar's poem 'A Bicycle Incident,' notes on the classical theme of 'Fortune and her Wheel,' and a Washington court ruling in the Lane-Chapman bicycle-assault case.
- Continued from the July Wheelman: toastmaster Charles E. Pratt presides over after-dinner speeches at the L.A.W.'s fourth annual meet banquet, including A. H. Curtiss of the National Association of Amateur Athletes, poet James Clarence Harvey, Clarkson N. Fuller on winning wheelmen's access to Central Park, and Frank W. Weston of the Cyclists' Touring Club.
- Answers to reader questions on the L.A.W. and Bicycle Union definitions of an amateur, the slowest recorded mile (C. S. Howard), and combination/tandem riders.
- Two editorials: one proposing a standard allowance for a racing track's inner 'pole' measurement, and one on the promising, if road-poor, growth of bicycling across the American West.
- News roundup covering the Capital Bicycle Club's Washington race meeting and the Prince-Higham world-championship match races there, the Hampton Court Meet in England, American racing notes from Rochester, Lancaster and Beacon Park, new L.A.W. state divisions and club notices, a letter from Sylvester Baxter riding in Mexico City, E. H. Burn's New Zealand notes, English notes on the Cyclists' Touring Club, the Canadian Wheelmen's Association meet at London, Ontario, and a letter from Zurich, Switzerland.
- Reviews of new books including Morgan Dix's 'Memoirs of John A. Dix,' Andrew Carnegie's 'An American Four-in-Hand in Britain,' Robert Louis Stevenson's 'An Inland Voyage,' Albion Tourgee's novel 'Hot Plowshares,' and S. Conant Foster's illustrated temperance poem 'The Temperance Telescope.'