ROUND THE BREAKFAST TABLE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue XVI, 19 October 1895, Page 474

ROUND THE BREAKFAST TABLE.

[with apologies to the autocrat op the breakfast TABLE.] HUNTING,’ said the Professor, * has been termed the sport of kings. It may be so. My acquaintance with these gentlemen and their ways is limited, and I have never hunted anything but rats. Who will deny, however, that there is reserved for ’cycling the glorious title rule, of king of sports ?' ‘ Apropos of rat-hunting,’ said the frivolous youth, ‘ its warmest supporters may not style it a sport for kings, but everyone will acknowledge that it is a sport for screams — when there are no chairs or tables near enough to assist beauty in distress.’ ‘ Young man,’ quoth the Professor, severely, ‘ I should feel sorry for beauty in distress did I not know that your gallantry exceeds your wit. Flippancy, amongst any but honourable members in Parliament assembled, is a fish out of water. There, it is the white-bait — or black bait—wherewith shoals of golden flying-hours are lured into shallow waters and lost forever. It is with members a fine art. Ordinary folks can be flippant, with very little sense in their flippancy—they can be flippant with none at all ; many of us make jokes with little meaning in them ; they can make jokes without any.’ The other lodgers listened to these truths in silence, their mouths too full to speak. The Professor made a a pause for effect, unnoticed by all except the cat, who took the opportunity to make an effect with her paws upon his plate. He then returned to his original theme. ‘ The virtues of a pneumatic tire—so-called because of of its inability to tire—might be summed up in almost

the identical terms of an Auckland tram-car. The one contributes quiet and ease ; the other contributes quiet and breeze. 1 * And flees,’ said the Frivolous Youth. So imperfect and deceptive is our English phonetic vocabulary, that the Elderly Maiden Aunt was conipelled to leave the table. •But everyone knows that Auckland tram-cars rfow? contribute to quiet and ease,’ said the Practical Man. ‘ For that reason it has been thought expedient by wise and good and conscientious people to post up Scrip, ture texts in the immediate vicinity of these notices, such as • Thou shalt not lie.’ ‘ Blessed are the merciful,’ •d o unto others as you would that they should do unto yon • Alas ! Tramway Company Directors are as unvieldittg and remorseless as railway refreshment room pie-crust. Again the Professor paused, not for a breath as might at first be supposed, but for boiled beef-steak pudding upon which and his subject he renewed attack. ‘ Ten years ago, a swift-gliding, still-moving machine, which could coil and uncoil, and twist and squirm, and dart and dive and double on its tracks, and quiver and slibber and shake, and thump and bump, and wriggle and wobble, and altogether conduct himself in the unpleasant and impolite manner of a boa-constrictor or a small boy in church, which could shoot over precipices with a style and finish calculated to turn the Falls of Niagara green with envy, or flounder into swamps and creeks and ditches and mud-pools with an ease that wouldn’t disgrace any young well brought up hippopotamus ; or smash into stone walls with a noble disregard of consequences peculiar to itself and politicians ; or silently, stealthily, uncannily steal upon the unwary pedestrian and the unwary pedestrian’s toes in the dark watches of the night, moving him to long for a second vocabulary

that his tongue might utter the thoughts which arise in this triumph of mechanical art, I say, existed ten years ago, only in the dreams of lunatics and geniuses. Xow horses are eating their heads off in the large centres at Home and abroad, and ’cycling for men and women has deservedly become the fashion of the day. The aristocracy, we read in the London papers (representing the fashion, if not always the beauty and wealth of the land), takes its morning airings in Battersea Park on bicycles, the feminine portion of it in “ bloomers.” I don’t doubt it ; there’s no false pride about a “ bike.” It will be as nice and obliging about running a real live lor<l into a bramble hedge or a frog-pond as it would the real live Lord’s butcher boy. On a democratic twowheeler — • “The aristocrat who banks with Coutts, The aristocrat who hunts and shoots. The aristocrat who cleans the boots— They ail shall equal be! ’ \Ve are told that a titled lady at Home takes riding tours through the country on a bicycle painted spotlessly white, attended—the lady, not the bicycle—by her footman and maid. Why the machine should be painted spotlessly white (unless from a benevolent desire to assist the farmers in scaring off birds), whether it is as spotlessly white by the time the titled lady has completed her riding tour, and if so, how so ; whether the maid and footman run behind, or are slung up in baskets, one on either side of the titled lady, or (for sociable purposes) two on one side, with the paint-pot between them, or follow on a tandem, or on stilts or rollerskates (which would be awkward for the paint pot) or in the baker's cart —these are problems that might suggest themselves to the curious, but which the writer wisely leaves to the imagination. The rest ofmy remarks I must leave to your imagination for the present. I intended to talk about the benefitsand pleasures and opportunities and sensibleness of ’cycling for women ; I have discoursed on rats and cats and members of Parliament and a few other equally -sensible subjects. Let my wisdom remain unspoken until our next meal.’