MARK TWAIN AS A WHEELMAN.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1578, 25 February 1887, Page 3

MARK TWAIN AS A WHEELMAN.

Among the hundreds of enthusiastic wheelmen in Hartford, says a despatch, are several clerical gentlemen, oue of them t'ifl rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd, Rev. J. H. Watson, who does his marketing, visits his parishioners, and performs all his perambulatory duties as a man and a minister—except, perhaps, attending funerals—upon hia bicycle. Eev. Charles E. Stoweis an expert rider, and Rev. J. H. Twitchell, pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church, bestrides awheel. The latter does it with fear "and trembling. His friend, Samuel L.Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, undertook to ride a bicycle at about the same time that his pastor began, and, like him, is not happy in the sport. The teacher of Mr Clemens, during the first weeks of his wheeling, tells this story of him Mr Clemens objected to assuming a costume suitable to the exercise, and one day started out to ride wearing a long linen duster over his clothes. His teacher gently suggested that it might be inconvenient. Mr Clemeas thought not. The young man feared a fall, but Mark Twain said that he wonld risk it. They had not gone four rods from home, however, when he began to revile the flapping thing, and in less than ten minutes the skirt was caught upon the weeel and carried up into the Y of the machine, and instantly the anthor of the " Innocents Abroad" lay upon his face in the dirt, with the machine clattering about his ears. His companion alighted and ran to help him. The scope and volume of vituperation that smoked up through the spokes of that wheel are said to be unrepeatable by persons less gifted in the language than the victim. He was rescued from the machine, and crawlins: to his feet said with stifled fury, "Wait a minute." Taking his knife from his pocket the amateur wheelman opened it, and with fierce determination cut the superfluous length from tbe linen coat until it took the semblance of a butcher's short frock, and then remounting his machine with the assistance of his trainer he said, " Now, I'll buy a Norfolk jacket, as I should have done before." Which he did. But he has never entirely conquered the skittish wheel. Chicago Times.