The Simmons Hardware Company, agents for the Columbia bicycles in this city (in whose employ were Messrs. Jordan, Sharps, Dennis, and Smith, and other wheelmen, whose acquaintance I made), had just moved a part of their immense business into a new six-story brick block, which was to all outward appearances substantially built, when one Sunday evening, without the slightest warning, the upper floor dropped and carried with it the five other floors down into the basement, burying and ruining one hundred and twenty-five bicycles and a full stock of bicycle sundries, the walls of the building remaining standing, apparently little injured. This occurred a short time before I arrived in the city, and, consequently, an order for a new head for my machine had to be sent to Hartford; but the delay has given me an opportunity to become better acquainted with the wheelmen, and although at Buffalo, Denver, San Francisco, and especially at Salt Lake City, not to mention other places, the cordial treatment I received made me regret to go on, yet, notwithstanding I have made the longest stay here that I have at any place, I am more loath to leave the St. Louis wheelmen than any I have met, and that is saying a good deal for them. Distance traveled on the wheel, 3,740 miles. CHAPTER XXVI. THROUGH KENTUCKY. I took the train from St. Louis, after receiving some road routes kindly given by Mr. Harry L. Swartz, to Louisville, Ky. My recollection of the Illinois dirt roads, after a lapse of five months, was too vivid. The result of my encounter with one hundred and twenty-five miles of clay ruts and lumps, had left too many scars behind, and my indignation had not sufficiently subsided from the boiling point, to make me care to wheel across that State a second time; so, after making the acquaintance of a few wheelmen in Louisville, among them Messrs. Thompson, Adams, Allison, and Huber, I started out over the Shelbyville pike. The pikes in Kentucky are macadamized, the rock used for that purpose being hauled and dumped alongside the road where it is broken up by negroes. It was no uncommon sight to see four or five "niggers," as they are always spoken of there, seated in rows by the roadside in the scorching sun pounding these rocks into small pieces. From twenty to twenty-five cents a perch is the price paid for this rock, and five perch is a very good day's work. The riding, as a general thing was very good, and there was plenty of coasting interspersed, but the many loose stones in the road would not allow very lively work.