asperated crowd below him and trying to
collect his mind. He was extraordinarily astonished at this run of
mishaps. Were the people really so annoyed? Everybody seemed angry
with him. No one seemed interested or amused by his arrival.
A disproportionate amount of the outcry had the flavour of
imprecation--had, indeed a strong flavour of riot. Several greatly
uniformed officials in cocked hats struggled in vain to control the
crowd. Fists and sticks were shaken. And when Bert saw a man on the
outskirts of the crowd run to a haycart and get a brightly pronged
pitch-fork, and a blue-clad soldier unbuckle his belt, his rising doubt
whether this little town was after all such a good place for a landing
became a certainty.

He had clung to the fancy that they would make something of a hero of
him. Now he knew that he was mistaken.

He was perhaps ten feet above the people when he made his decision.
His paralysis ceased. He leapt up on the seat, and, at imminent risk of
falling headlong, released the grapnel-rope from the toggle that held
it, sprang on to the trail rope and disengaged that also. A hoarse shout
of disgust greeted the descent of the grapnel-rope and the swift leap
of the balloon, and something--he fancied afterwards it was a
turnip--whizzed by his head. The trail-rope followed its fellow. The
crowd seemed to jump away from him. With an immense and horrifying
rustle the balloon brushed against a telephone pole, and for a tense
instant he anticipated either an electric explosion or a bursting of the
oiled silk, or both. But fortune was with him.

In another second he was cowering in the bottom of the car, and released
from the weight of the grapnel and the two ropes, rushing up once more
through the air. For a time he remained crouching, and when at last he
looked out again the little town was very small and travelling, with the
rest of lower Germany, in a circular orbit round and round the car--or
at least it appeared to be doing that. When he got used to it, he found
this rotation of the balloon rather convenient; it saved moving about in
the car.

5

Late in the afternoon of a pleasant summer day in the year 191-, if one
may borrow a mode of phrasing that once found favour with the readers of
the late G. P. R. James, a solitary balloonist--replacing the solitary
horseman of the classic romances--might have been observed wending his
way across Franconia in a north-easterly direction, and at a height of
ab