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. But it has a magic of another kind for woman, and I wish that some woman of genius would arise and, inspired perhaps by the ghost of Benjamin Ward Richardson in his prophetic mood, tell of this magic to her sisters. Tell them, if they are above labour in the fields or at the wash-tub, that the wheel, without fatiguing, will give them the deep breath which will purify the blood, invigorate the heart, stiffen the backbone, harden the muscles; that the mind will follow and accommodate itself to these physical changes; finally, that the wheel will be of more account to them than all the platforms in the land, and clubs of all the pioneers and colleges, all congresses, titles, honours, votes, and all the books that have been or ever will be written. XXXIII WASPS AND MEN I now find that I must go back to the subject of my last paper on the wasp in order to define my precise attitude towards that insect. Then, too, there was another wasp at table, not in itself a remarkably interesting incident, but I am anxious to relate it for the following reason. If there is one sweetest thought, one most cherished memory in a man's mind, especially if he be a person of gentle pacific disposition, whose chief desire is to live in peace and amity with all men, it is the thought and recollection of a good fight in which he succeeded in demolishing his adversary. If his fights have been rare adventures and in most cases have gone against him, so much the more will he rejoice in that one victory. It chanced that a wasp flew into the breakfast room of a country house in which I was a guest, when we were all--about fourteen in number, mostly ladies, young and middle-aged--seated at the table. The wasp went his rounds in the usual way, dropping into this or that plate or dish, feeling foods with his antennae or tasting with his tongue, but staying nowhere, and as he moved so did the ladies, starting back with little screams and exclamations of disgust and apprehension. For these ladies, it hardly need be said, were not cyclists. Then the son of the house, a young gentleman of twenty-two, a footballer and general athlete, got up, pushed back his chair and said: "Don't worry, I'll soon settle his hash." Then I too rose from my seat, for I had made a vow not to allow a wasp to be killed unnecessarily in my presence. "Leave it to me, please," I said, "and I'll put him out in a minute." "No, sit down," he returned. "I have said I'm going to kill it."