atehouse
smartly, snapped a flag staff, played a tune upon some telegraph wires,
and sent a broken wire like a whip-lash to do its share in accumulating
unpopularity. Bert, by clutching convulsively, just escaped being
pitched headlong. Two young soldiers and several peasants shouted things
up to him and shook fists at him and began to run in pursuit as he
disappeared over the wall into the town.

Admiring rustics, indeed!

The balloon leapt at once, in the manner of balloons when part of their
weight is released by touching down, with a sort of flippancy, and
in another moment Bert was over a street crowded with peasants
and soldiers, that opened into a busy market-square. The wave of
unfriendliness pursued him.

"Grapnel," said Bert, and then with an afterthought shouted, "TETES
there, you! I say! I say! TETES. 'Eng it!"

The grapnel smashed down a steeply sloping roof, followed by an
avalanche of broken tiles, jumped the street amidst shrieks and cries,
and smashed into a plate-glass window with an immense and sickening
impact. The balloon rolled nauseatingly, and the car pitched. But the
grapnel had not held. It emerged at once bearing on one fluke, with
a ridiculous air of fastidious selection, a small child's chair, and
pursued by a maddened shopman. It lifted its catch, swung about with an
appearance of painful indecision amidst a roar of wrath, and dropped
it at last neatly, and as if by inspiration, over the head of a peasant
woman in charge of an assortment of cabbages in the market-place.

Everybody now was aware of the balloon. Everybody was either trying to
dodge the grapnel or catch the trail rope. With a pendulum-like swoop
through the crowd, that sent people flying right and left the grapnel
came to earth again, tried for and missed a stout gentleman in a blue
suit and a straw hat, smacked away a trestle from under a stall of
haberdashery, made a cyclist soldier in knickerbockers leap like
a chamois, and secured itself uncertainly among the hind-legs of a
sheep--which made convulsive, ungenerous efforts to free itself, and was
dragged into a position of rest against a stone cross in the middle of
the place. The balloon pulled up with a jerk. In another moment a score
of willing hands were tugging it earthward. At the same instant Bert
became aware for the first time of a fresh breeze blowing about him.

For some seconds he stood staggering in the car, which now swayed
sickeningly, surveying the ex