replied, whose skepticism, in fact, had not settled upon the five
months, but altogether upon the five minutes. The apparatus for spinning
him, however, would not work: a fact which was evidently owing to the
stupidity of the gardener. On reconsidering the subject, he announced,
to the disappointment of some among us, that, although the physical
discovery was now complete, he saw a moral difficulty. It was not a
_humming_-top that was required, but a _peg_-top; and this, in order to
keep up the _vertigo_ at full stretch, without which to a certainty,
gravitation would prove too much for him, needed to be whipped
incessantly. Now, that was what a gentleman ought not to tolerate: to be
scourged unintermittingly on the legs by any grub of a gardener, unless
it were Father Adam himself, was a thing that he could not bring his
mind to endure. However, as some compensation, he proposed to improve
the art of flying, which was, as every body must acknowledge, in a
condition quite disgraceful to civilized society. As he had made many a
fire balloon, and had succeeded in some attempts at bringing down cats
by _parachutes_, it was not very difficult to fly downward from moderate
elevations. But, as he was reproached by my sister for never flying back
again, which, how ever, was a far different thing, and not even
attempted by the philosopher in "Rasselas" (for

Revocare gradum et _superas_ evadere ad auras,
Hic labor, hoc opus est),

he refused, under such poor encouragement, to try his winged
_parachutes_ any more, either "aloft or alow," till he had thoroughly
studied Bishop Wilkins[12] on the art of translating right reverend
gentlemen to the moon; and, in the mean time, he resumed his general
lectures on physics. From these, however, he was speedily driven, or one
might say shelled out, by a concerted assault of my sister's. He had
been in the habit of lowering the pitch of his lectures with
ostentatious condescension to the presumed level of our poor
understandings. This superciliousness annoyed my sister; and,
accordingly, with the help of two young female visitors, and my next
younger brother--in subsequent times a little middy on board many a ship
of H.M., and the most predestined rebel upon earth against all
assumptions, small or great, of superiority--she arranged a mutiny, that
had the unexpected effect of suddenly extinguishing the lectures
forever. He had happened to say, what was no unusual thing with him,
t