Around the World on a Bicycle - Volume 1 eBook

Thomas Stevens (cyclist)
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 677 pages of information about Around the World on a Bicycle.

Around the World on a Bicycle - Volume 1 eBook

Thomas Stevens (cyclist)
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 677 pages of information about Around the World on a Bicycle.

“Down a romantic Swiss glen, where scores of sylvan nooks and rippling rills invite one to cast about for fairies and sprites,” is the word descriptive of my route from Marcellus next morning.  Once again, on nearing the Camillus outlet from the narrow vale, I hear the sound of Sunday bells, and after the church-bell-less Western wilds, it seems to me that their notes have visited me amid beautiful scenes, strangely often of late.  Arriving at Camillus, I ask the name of the sparkling little stream that dances along this fairy glen like a child at play, absorbing the sun-rays and coquettishly reflecting them in the faces of the venerable oaks that bend over it like loving guardians protecting it from evil.  My ears are prepared to hear a musical Indian name — “Laughing-Waters " at least; but, like a week’s washing ruthlessly intruding upon love’s young dream, falls on my waiting ears the unpoetic misnomer, “Nine-Mile Creek.”  Over good roads to Syracuse, and from thence my route leads down the Erie Canal, alternately riding down the canal tow-path, the wagon-roads, and between the tracks of the New York Central Railway.  On the former, the greatest drawback to peaceful cycling is the towing-mule and his unwarrantable animosity toward the bicycle, and the awful, unmentionable profanity engendered thereby in the utterances of the boatmen.  Sometimes the burden of this sulphurous profanity is aimed at me, sometimes at the inoffensive bicycle, or both of us collectively, but oftener is it directed at the unspeakable mule, who is really the only party to blame.  A mule scares, not because he is really afraid, but because he feels skittishly inclined to turn back, or to make trouble between his enemies — the boatmen, his task-master, and the cycler, an intruder on his exclusive domain, the Erie tow-path.  A span of mules will pretend to scare, whirl around, and jerk loose from the driver, and go “scooting” back down the tow-path in a manner indicating that nothing less than a stone wall would stop them; but, exactly in the nick of time to prevent the tow-line jerking them sidewise into the canal, they stop.  Trust a mule for never losing his head when he runs away, as does his hot-headed relative, the horse; who never once allows surrounding circumstances to occupy his thoughts to an extent detrimental to his own self-preservative interests.  The Erie Canal mule’s first mission in life is to engender profanity and strife between boatmen and cyclists, and the second is to work and chew hay, which brings him out about even with the world all round.  At Rome I enter the famous and beautiful Mohawk Valley, a place long looked forward to with much pleasurable anticipation, from having heard so often of its natural beauties and its interesting historical associations.  “It’s the garden spot of the world; and travellers who have been all over Europe and everywhere, say there’s nothing in the world to equal the quiet landscape beauty of the Mohawk Valley,”

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Project Gutenberg
Around the World on a Bicycle - Volume 1 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.