Who ate the pink sweetmeat?. Coolidge Susan

just where the road elbows by the Widow Briggs’s place, when something passed us like whiz! I’d been pulling along with the sled rope over my arm, and my hands in my pockets, and didn’t hear a team or anything, but it made me shy off the side of the road, and pretty near upset Mrar. School lets out at four o’clock, and dusk comes soon after that, but it was woolly gray yet, so you could see plain except in the fence corners, and the thing that passed us was a man riding on nothing but one big wheel.

      “O, see there!” says Mrar, scared as could be. I felt glad on her account we’s close to Widow Briggs’s place. It would be easy to hustle her over Briggs’s fence; but the thing run so still and fast it might take fences as well as a straight road.

      The man turned round after he passed us, and came rearing back, away up on that wheel, and I stood as close before the sled as I could. He sat high up in the air, and wiggled his feet on each side of the wheel, and I never saw a camel or elephant, or any kind of wild thing at a show that made me feel so funny. But just when I thought he’s going to cut through us, he turned short, and stopped. He had on an overcoat to his ears, and a fur cap down to his nose, and hairy gloves on, and a little satchel strapped over his shoulder, and I saw there was a real small wheel behind the big one that balanced him up. He wasn’t sitting on the tire neither, but on a saddle place, and the big wheel had lots of silver spokes crossing back and forward.

      “Whose children are you?” says the man.