They that know nothing fear nothing. Away back in 1886 my alert young friend, Miss Anna Gordon, and my ingenious young niece, Miss Katharine Willard, took to the tricycle as naturally as ducks take to water. The very first time they mounted they went spinning down the long shady street, with its pleasant elms, in front of Rest Cottage, where for nearly a generation mother and I had had our home. Even as the war-horse snuffeth the battle from afar, I longed to go and do likewise. Remembering my country bringing-up and various exploits in running, climbing, horseback-riding, to say nothing of my tame heifer that I trained for a Bucephalus, I said to myself, “If those girls can ride without learning so can I!” Taking out my watch I timed them as they, at my suggestion, set out to make a record in going round the square. Two and a half minutes was the result. I then started with all my forces well 64in hand, and flew around in two and a quarter minutes. Not contented with this, but puffed up with foolish vanity, I declared that I would go around in two minutes; and, encouraged by their cheers, away I went without a fear till the third turning-post was reached, when the left hand played me false, and turning at an acute angle, away I went sidelong, machine and all, into the gutter, falling on my right elbow, which felt like a glassful of chopped ice, and I knew that for the first time in a life full of vicissitudes I had been really hurt. Anna Gordon’s white face as she ran toward me caused me to wave my uninjured hand and call out, “Never mind!” and with her help I rose and walked into the house, wishing above all things to go straight to my own room and lie on my own bed, and thinking as I did so how pathetic is that instinct that makes “the stricken deer go weep,” the harmed hare seek the covert.  
Two physicians were soon at my side, and my mother, then over eighty years of age, 65came in with much controlled agitation and seated herself beside my bed, taking my hand and saying, “O Frank! you were always too adventurous.”
 
Our family physician was out of town, and the two gentlemen were well-nigh strangers. It was a kind face, that of the tall, thin man who looked down upon me in my humiliation, put his ear against my heart to see if there would be any harm in administering ether, handled my elbow with a woman’s gentleness, and then said to his assistant, “Now let us begin.” And to me who had been always well, and knew nothing of such unnatural proceedings, he remarked, “Breathe into the funnel—full, natural breaths; that is all you have to do.”
 
I set myself to my task, as has been my wont always, and soon my mother and my friend, Anna Gordon, who were fanning me with big “palm-leaves,” became grotesque and then ridiculous, and I remember saying (or at least I remember that I once 66remembered), “You are a couple of enormous crickets standing on your hind legs, and you have each a spear of dry grass, and you look as if you were paralyzed; and you wave your withered spears of grass, and you call that fanning a poor woman who is suffocating before your eyes.” I labored with them, entreated them, and dealt with them in great plainness—so much so that my mother could not bear to hear me talk in such a foolish fashion, and quietly withdrew to her own room, closed the door, and sat down to possess her soul in patience until the operation should be over.
 
Then the scene changed, and as they put on the splints pain was involved, and I heard those about me laughing in the most unfeeling manner while I murmured: “She always believed in humanity—she always said she did and would; and she has lived in this town thirty years, and they are hurting her—they are hurting her dreadfully; and if they keep on she will lose her faith in human nature, 67and if she should it will be the greatest calamity that can happen to a human being.”
 
Now the scene changed once more—I was in the starry heavens, and said to the young friends who had come in and stood beside me: “Here are stars as thick as apples on a bough, and if you are good you shall each have one. And, Anna, because you are good, and always have been, you shall be given a whole solar system to manage just as you like. The Heavenly Father has no end of them; He tosses them out of His hand as a boy does marbles; He spins them like a cocoon; He has just as many after He has given them away as He had before He began.”
 
Then there settled down upon me the most vivid and pervadin............