And men returned from the front to cast
off their bloodstained clothes and wash and bleach their blackened
faces, to put themselves in a pretty livery and drive the ladies and
their Pekinese once more?
A friend of mine once wrote a charming booklet entitled Wheel
Magic, which was all about his rambles on the machine and its
effect on him. He is not an athlete - on the contrary he is a bookish
man who has written books enough to fill a cart, and has had so much to
do with books all his life that one might imagine he had by some
strange accident been born in the reading-room of the British Museum;
or that originally he had actually been a bookworm, a sort of mite,
spontaneously engendered between the pages of a book, and that the
supernatural being who presides over the reading-room had, as a little
pleasantry, transformed him into a man so as to enable him to read the
books on which he had previously nourished himself.
I can't follow my friend's wanderings and adventures as, springing out
of his world of books, he flits and glides like a vagrant, swift-
winged, irresponsible butterfly about the land, sipping the nectar from
a thousand flowers and doing his hundred miles in a day and feeling all
the better for it, for this was a man's book, and the wheel and its
magic was never a necessity in man's life.
