ching
arms. He did stand on his head, more or less, his tow-beard came off
and got in his mouth, and his cheek slid along against padding. His nose
buried itself in a bag of sand. The car gave a violent lurch, and became
still.

"Confound it!" he said.

He had an impression he must be stunned because of a surging in his
ears, and because all the voices of the people about him had become
small and remote. They were shouting like elves inside a hill.

He found it a little difficult to get on his feet. His limbs were mixed
up with the garments Mr. Butteridge had discarded when that gentleman
had thought he must needs plunge into the sea. Bert bawled out half
angry, half rueful, "You might have said you were going to tip
the basket." Then he stood up and clutched the ropes of the car
convulsively.

Below him, far below him, shining blue, were the waters of the English
Channel. Far off, a little thing in the sunshine, and rushing down as if
some one was bending it hollow, was the beach and the irregular cluster
of houses that constitutes Dymchurch. He could see the little crowd of
people he had so abruptly left. Grubb, in the white wrapper of a Desert
Dervish, was running along the edge of the sea. Mr. Butteridge was
knee-deep in the water, bawling immensely. The lady was sitting up with
her floriferous hat in her lap, shockingly neglected. The beach, east
and west, was dotted with little people--they seemed all heads and
feet--looking up. And the balloon, released from the twenty-five stone
or so of Mr. Butteridge and his lady, was rushing up into the sky at the
pace of a racing motor-car. "My crikey!" said Bert; "here's a go!"

He looked down with a pinched face at the receding beach, and reflected
that he wasn't giddy; then he made a superficial survey of the cords and
ropes about him with a vague idea of "doing something." "I'm not going
to mess about with the thing," he said at last, and sat down upon the
mattress. "I'm not going to touch it.... I wonder what one ought to do?"

Soon he got up again and stared for a long time it the sinking world
below, at white cliffs to the east and flattening marsh to the left, at
a minute wide prospect of weald and downland, at dim towns and harbours
and rivers and ribbon-like roads, at ships and ships, decks and
foreshortened funnels upon the ever-widening sea, and at the great
mono-rail bridge that straddled the Channel from Folkestone to Boulogne,
until at last, first littl