and follow as you can."

She nodded.

She came right up to the pavilion and hovered for a time shyly, and then
went away.

I found my uncle in my sitting-room in an arm-chair, with his feet upon
the fender of the gas stove, which he had lit, and now he was feebly
drunken with my whisky, and very weary in body and spirit, and inclined
to be cowardly.

"I lef' my drops," he said.

He changed his clothes slowly and unwillingly. I had to bully him, I had
almost to shove him to the airship and tuck him up upon its wicker flat.
Single-handed I made but a clumsy start; we scraped along the roof
of the shed and bent a van of the propeller, and for a time I hung
underneath without his offering a hand to help me to clamber up. If it
hadn't been for a sort of anchoring trolley device of Cothope's, a sort
of slip anchor running on a rail, we should never have got clear at all.

V

The incidents of our flight in Lord Roberts B do not arrange themselves
in any consecutive order. To think of that adventure is like dipping
haphazard into an album of views. One is reminded first of this and then
of that. We were both lying down on a horizontal plate of basketwork;
for Lord Roberts B had none of the elegant accommodation of a balloon. I
lay forward, and my uncle behind me in such a position that he could
see hardly anything of our flight. We were protected from rolling over
simply by netting between the steel stays. It was impossible for us to
stand up at all; we had either to lie or crawl on all fours over
the basket work. Amidships were lockers made of Watson's Aulite
material,--and between these it was that I had put my uncle, wrapped in
rugs. I wore sealskin motoring boots and gloves, and a motoring fur coat
over my tweeds, and I controlled the engine by Bowden wires and levers
forward.

The early part of that night's experience was made up of warmth, of
moonlit Surrey and Sussex landscape, and of a rapid and successful
flight, ascending and swooping, and then ascending again southward. I
could not watch the clouds because the airship overhung me; I could not
see the stars nor gauge the meteorological happening, but it was
fairly clear to me that a wind shifting between north and northeast
was gathering strength, and after I had satisfied myself by a series
of entirely successful expansions and contractions of the real
air-worthiness of Lord Roberts B, I stopped the engine to save my
petrol, and let the monster drift, chec