ou are up in the air it
looks as if you might as well try to drop on a pin's point. But after
all, it was a nothing--a mere nothing, gentlemen, I assure you. Any one
of you could have done the same."

Every one in the room was delighted, not less with the captain's
gallantry than with his modesty. Many moving stories of his escapes were
retailed. Josiah listened with enthralled attention to an adventure
which, it seems, the captain had had in Spain, and which Josiah's
companion (a bald-headed gentleman with spectacles) narrated with great
effect. Mulberry in one of the marches of the Carlists, to whom he had
attached himself, was surprised and taken prisoner by the enemy. They
locked him in the kitchen of a farmhouse near, mentioning incidentally
that in the morning they would shoot him. They took away his sword and
pistols; and would have taken his umbrella, but the captain pleaded hard
for its society, declaring that from early boyhood he had never been
able to sleep without an umbrella under his pillow. The Spaniards had
heard much of the eccentricity of Englishmen, and not being inclined to
refuse the request of a doomed man, they left him the umbrella.

The next morning, when they came to take him out for shooting purposes,
lo! the captain and the umbrella were both gone. There was a good deal
of soot about the place, and regarding this and other signs of hasty
flight the truth flashed upon the Spaniards. There had been a fire in
the grate. The captain had opened the umbrella inside the chimney,
waited till it had been inflated with the warm air, and then, hanging on
the handle, had been drawn up clear to the top and descending in a
neighbouring field, had shut up his umbrella and walked off.

"Dear me!" said Josiah; "how very interesting. I suppose the chimneys
are wide in Spain?"

"Very wide indeed," said the bald-headed gentleman in spectacles.

Josiah regarded the captain with fresh interest after the recital of
this remarkable ascent, and it was not diminished by further tales he
heard. One related to his reception by an Illustrious Personage. After
his journey to Orkney the I.P. had sent for him immediately on his
return to town. The captain had put on his uniform and gone cheerfully.
He had heard so much of his feat that he began to think there really was
something creditable in it, and fancied the Illustrious Personage might
be going to bestow upon him some recognition of the service he had done
in bla