And now you come to the voluntary dismount; you learned
the other kind first of all. It is quite easy
to tell one how to do the voluntary dismount; the
words are few, the requirement simple, and apparently
undifficult; let your left pedal go down till your
left leg is nearly straight, turn your wheel to the
left, and get off as you would from a horse.
It certainly does sound exceedingly easy; but it isn’t.
I don’t know why it isn’t but it isn’t.
Try as you may, you don’t get down as you would
from a horse, you get down as you would from a house
afire. You make a spectacle of yourself every
time.
During the eight days I took a daily lesson an hour
and a half. At the end of this twelve working-hours’
appreticeship I was graduated—in the rough.
I was pronounced competent to paddle my own bicycle
without outside help. It seems incredible, this
celerity of acquirement. It takes considerably
longer than that to learn horseback-riding in the
rough.
Now it is true that I could have learned without a
teacher, but it would have been risky for me, because
of my natural clumsiness. The self-taught man
seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know
a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked
under teachers; and, besides, he brags, and is the
means of fooling other thoughtless people into going
and doing as he himself has done. There are those
who imagine that the unlucky accidents of life—life’s
“experiences”—are in some way
useful to us. I wish I could find out how.
I never knew one of them to happen twice. They
always change off and swap around and catch you on
your inexperienced side. If personal experience
can be worth anything as an education, it wouldn’t
seem likely that you could trip Methuselah; and yet
if that old person could come back here it is more
that likely that one of the first things he would do
would be to take hold of one of these electric wires
and tie himself all up in a knot. Now the surer
thing and the wiser thing would be for him to ask somebody
whether it was a good thing to take hold of.
But that would not suit him; he would be one of the
self-taught kind that go by experience; he would want
to examine for himself. And he would find, for
his instruction, that the coiled patriarch shuns the
electric wire; and it would be useful to him, too,
and would leave his education in quite a complete
and rounded-out condition, till he should come again,
some day, and go to bouncing a dynamite-can around
to find out what was in it.
But we wander from the point. However, get a
teacher; it saves much time and Pond’s Extract.
