Page:Burke, W.S. - Cycling in Bengal (1898).djvu/16

( 2 ) a large town, he will hardly have cleared the suburbs in a couple of hours' constitutional. A horse is expensive to buy and costly to keep, while it cannot be used too freely or for too fast work, but a bicycle is cheap when compared to the price of even a moderately good horse; it suffers in a mechanical sense only from hard work, and the rider's powers of endurance form the only limit to the work extracted from it, while, as it can easily be ridden at the pace of a fast horse, a cyclist can ride ten miles while a pedestrian is walking three, this being a fair average for a person who rides merely for amusement, and has no aspirations towards scorching. In other words, while a man travelling afoot is getting from Calcutta to, say, Ghoosery, the bicyclist will about have reached Serampore, and at the end will be much less fatigued than the other.

The ability to thus obtain a change of scene is not the least of the advantages offered by the bicycle, which has now been taken up by the highest in the land. There was a time when bicyclists were rather looked down upon, and when few people of good social position were seen on machines. Ten years ago we might have looked in vain for an announcement that a Judge of the High Court and his wife were taking a tour on their bicycles. Fashion, however, has taken bicycling under its wing, with the result that wheelmen and wheelwomen have increased and multiplied, and what was once regarded as an amusement for the middle classes, is now universally popular. That bicycling is no longer an amusement to be ashamed of is an extremely fortunate circumstance,