The Bicycling World, Vol 2, No 10
Articles in this issue
- A comic sketch by "Knick O'Bocker" opening the Midwinter Number: Jeremiah Blowhard practises his new bicycle bugle so relentlessly that he empties Topnotch Lane of its residents, buys up the depressed block on six months' time, and sells out at a fortune once quiet returns.
- Editorial paragraphs greet readers with the Midwinter Number, joke about the new "Fighting Editor" Bull and the League badge forever promised "in a week or ten days," and announce coming contributions from A. S. Parsons and Ixion plus the conclusions of Madeline's story and Mr. Chandler's English tour.
- A poem with the refrain "through by-ways green," recalling summer rides past singing larks, apple blossoms and honey-bees along hedge-lined country lanes.
- The Bicycling World leaders argue that the bicycle's practical utility as everyday transport guarantees its permanence beyond any fashion in sport, and survey the club-uniform question, the Boston Club having adopted dark green and the Massachusetts dark blue with short single-breasted jackets.
- Madeline recounts how her friend Carrie's fiance, Mr. Grenadine, rider of a silver-plated bicycle, paid court to her during his suburban visits until Carrie's letter exposed his caddish creed that flirtation is "the proper thing to do"; to be concluded in the next number.
- First installment of Alfred D. Chandler's account of an August 1879 tour with John C. Sharp, Jr., of the Suffolk Bicycle Club of Boston: from Charing Cross by rail to Stroud, then awheel through Rochester, Maidstone, Canterbury, Margate, Dover, Hastings, Brighton, Arundel and Chichester to Portsmouth, part of some 1,700 miles of English and Welsh travel, with an accompanying map of England and Wales.
- A verse imitation of Peacock's "Drinking Catch" in which Kol Kron, cruising the Paleocrystic Sea on his yacht "The Bull Dorg," meets three Gotham clubmen riding out to rake the moon — a sixty-inch wheel — out of the sea.
- President Bates tells how six uniformed clubmen — Lowe, High, Twiddle, Condor and Bumps among them — make New-Year's calls by bicycle on Mrs. Tonish, Alderman Obstacle's family, the Hon. Popular Baggem's and the Rev. Dr. Ample, hoping to head off an anti-bicycle ordinance, with headers on the ice and social disasters at every stop.
- A page of comic drawings with primer-style captions lampooning League of American Wheelmen badge-wearers, a twenty-five-dollar-a-month turnpike, the ventilated helmet of the "Bos-sa-chu-setts" Bicycle Club, and "Will. U. Quit-man," the Lone Amateur of America.
- The Archery Field leader on winter recreations weighs skating, snowshoeing, curling, ice yachting, sail-skating and snowball warfare as pastimes while bow and wheel are laid up, citing foot-ton estimates of the daily exercise a healthy man may take.
- A poem by Will H. Thompson apostrophizing a veteran hunting bow, recalling Tallulah's rushing flood, Toccoa's falling cloud and the vanished wilderness days of its youth.
- "Captain Jack" describes bow-hunting on skates in the Maine woods: after cutting his bow-string with his skates on the ice, he kills thirteen rabbits and drops a two-hundred-pound stag with an Aldred yew, beating his three shotgun-carrying companions — then loses both stags' heads to Tom at a game of old sledge.
- A sonnet by Frank H. Walworth on the poet whose careless "golden drippings" drew the land's merry folk to archery, the myriad arrows gleaming "low-voiced with cadences of songs unsung."
- A. G. Whitman of Melrose, Mass., answers a Highland Park correspondent on home-made bow woods: hornbeam is too laborious and doubtful, lancewood costs but 50 cents, flowering dogwood lacks elasticity, the Penobscot Indians season white maple in the wigwam, and northern red cedar (savin) would not fail in trial against any yew of equal weight.
- Dean V. R. Manley reports that the Toledo Archery Club is hibernating for the winter, having resolved itself into a dramatic association and planned lawn tennis for its bow-weary members, a policy that has kept the club as healthy as at its organization.
- Comic verses reprinted from the Indianapolis Journal on a grand archery tournament whose heroes miss the target to the jeers of hoodlums, yet are credited by the daily papers with piercing the "gold" at a hundred paces.
- Portrait sketch of Llewellyn H. Johnson of Orange, New Jersey — founder and captain of the Essex Bicycle Club, holder of the two-mile and fifty-mile amateur championships of America and the New Jersey and Canada titles — with his full racing list of thirty-two races (twenty-five firsts) for 1879-80.
- "Middlesex" of Malden reminisces over a first season awheel and a last November run through Middlesex Fells past Spot Pond and Stoneham to Woburn, to see H. H. Richardson's new public library, the memorial of young Mr. Winn.
- A closing note correcting the impression that one or two firms monopolize the importation of foreign bicycles into America: several concerns import with full rights, and licenses under the American patents are readily granted on favorable terms.