Jasper County Democrat, Volume 3, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 April 1900 — Man with the Bicycle Hump. [ARTICLE]

Man with the Bicycle Hump.

Bowed by the weight of “centuries” he leans Across his handlebars and gazes on the ground. His is the emptiness of the bicycle face; His back might bear the burden of the world. Who made him dead to heedfulness aud caution, A thing that looks not and that never cares, Stolid and stunniug, a brother (o the trolley car? Who slanted down those gleaming handlebars? Whose breath blew out the light within that lamp? Is this the thing the manufacturer gave To have-dominion over street and boulevard, To trace the paths and search the suburbs for a road, To feel the joy of swift locomotion? Is this the dTenui dreamed by the maker of tbe machine, Who stiffened that strong diamond frame of steel? Down all the stretch of road to the roadhouse There is no shape more terrible than this— More tongued with censure of the world's pedestrians, More filled with signs and portents for the passerby,» More fraught with menace to the universe. What gulfs between him and Apollo Belvedere! Slave of the wheel of rubber, what to him Are rules of parks and swing of coppers’ - clubs, What the long reaches of the law’s strong arm, The broken leg, the reddening nose? Through this dread shape the seorehiug age looks down, Fast time's tragedy is in that aching stoop. Through this dread shape, humanity betrayed, Twisted, beut over, and all humped, Cries protest to makers of the bike, A protest that is also prophecy. O manufacturers, dealers in all lands, Is this the chromo that you give the world. This monstrous thing, distorted and awry? How will you ever straighten up this shape, Give back the proud and upward looking head, Make right the awful sinuosity, The parabolic incurvation, deflexion serjtentine? How will the future reckon with this man? How answer his brute question in that hour. When he is bent just like n boomerang? How will it be with the makers of the wheel. With those who shaped him to the thing he is. When the beut terror tries to straighten up, After he his ridden all his centuries? —New York Snn.