I was beginning to move more rapidly along the little path, well worn by many rubber tires, which edged the broad roadway, when I perceived the doctor's daughter standing at the gate of her father's front yard. As I knew her very well, and she happened to be standing there and looking in my direction, I felt that it would be the proper thing for me to stop and speak to her, and so I dismounted and proceeded to roll my bicycle up to the gate. As the doctor's daughter stood looking over the gate, her hands clasped the tops of the two central pickets. "Good-morning," said she. "I suppose, from your carrying baggage, that you are starting off for your vacation. How far do you expect to go on your wheel, and do you travel alone?" -- "My only plan," I answered, "is to ride over the hills and far away! How far I really do not know; and I shall be alone except for this good companion." And as I said this I patted the handle-bar of my bicycle. -- "Your wheel does seem to be a sort of a companion," she said; "not so good as a horse, but better than nothing. I should think, traveling all by yourself in this way, you would have quite a friendly feeling for it. Did you ever think of giving it a name?" -- "Oh yes," said I. "I have named it. I call it a 'Bicycle of Cathay.'"

Author Biography

Frank Richard Stockton (1834 - 1902) was an American writer and humorist, best known today for a series of innovative children's fairy tales that were widely popular during the last decades of the 19th century. Stockton avoided the didactic moralizing common to children's stories of the time. Instead, he humorously poked fun at greed, violence, abuse of power and other human foibles, describing his fantastic characters' adventures in a charming, matter-of-fact way in stories like "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" (1885) and "The Bee-Man of Orn" (1887). These last two stories were republished in 1963 and 1964, respectively, in editions illustrated by Maurice Sendak. "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" won a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1963. His 1895 adventure novel The Adventures of Captain Horn was the third-best selling book in the United States in 1895.