would get down again. For with wings
it is almost easier to rise than to fall, and a first flight is, before
anything else, a series of vivid and audacious surprises.

For a long time Jimbo was so dizzy with excitement and the novelty of
the sensation that he forgot his deliverer altogether.

And what a flight it was! Instead of the steady race of the carrier
pigeon, or of the rooks homeward bound at evening, it was the see-saw
motion of the wren's swinging journey across the lawn; only heavier,
faster, and with more terrific impetus. Up and down, each time with a
rise and fall of twenty feet, he careered, whistling through the summer
night; at the drop of each curve, so low that the scents of dewy grass
rose into his face; at the crest of it, so high that the trees and
hedges often became mere blots upon the dark surface of the earth.

The fields rushed by beneath him; the white roads flashed past like
streaks of snow. Sometimes he shot across sheets of water and felt the
cooler air strike his cheeks; sometimes over sheltered meadows, where
the sunshine had slept all day and the air was still soft and warm; on
and on, as easily as rain dropping from the sky, or wind rushing
earthwards from between the clouds. Everything flew past him at an
astonishing rate--everything but the bright stars that gazed calmly down
overhead; and when he looked up and saw their steadfastness it helped to
keep within bounds the fine alarm of this first excursion into the great
vault of the sky.

"Gently, child!" gasped Miss Lake behind him. "We shall never keep it up
at this rate."

"Oh! but it's so wonderful," he cried, drawing in the air loudly
between his teeth, and shaking his wings rapidly like a hawk before it
drops.

The pace slackened a little and the girl drew up alongside. For some
time they flew forward together in silence.

They had been skirting the edge of a wood, when suddenly the trees fell
away and Jimbo gave a scream and rose fifty feet into the air with a
single bound. Straight in front of him loomed an immense, glaring disc
that seemed to swim suddenly up into the sky above the trees. It hung
there before his eyes and dazzled him.

"It's only the moon," cried Miss Lake from below.

Jimbo dropped through the air to her side again with a gasp.

"I thought it was a big hole in the sky with fire rushing through," he
explained breathlessly.

The boy stared, full of wonder and delight, at the huge flaming circle