paper pellet thrown at one beside the overwhelming blow
of the loss of her father's record.

And he who could quote Shakespeare upon "Something rotten in the state
of Denmark", amid the horrors of a zero train-wreck, who "liked his
excitement warm", had a sense of humor.

True humor is never without a sense of proportion.

It knows where to stop.

But if the nickum was not the thief,--who then?

Ta-te, the tempest--otherwise the mountain gusts--had to be acquitted
too.

For at the first dawn after the blighted experiment some thin silk rags
of a raven parachute were found clinging, soot-like, to bushes in the
spruce wood, together with a portion of a twisted and bent wire frame.

There was not a trace of the diary, the golden egg, the little
perforated steel box, with the recording pencil and paper in it.
Deprived of its wing, that could not have gone on alone,--without some
hand carrying it.

So the weary and despondent searchers were forced to accept Andrew's
assertion that "mon or deil" had robbed them; and it was plain from the
solemn shake of the "true-penny's" gray head in its up-to-date
chauffeur's cap that he, himself, was disposed to lay the blame on a
"deev."

"It's plain to me, noo, that this auld Earth should bide where she
belangs," he told the two girls, "not go outside o' her ain bit
atmosphere--be sending muckle messages outside it--it's na canny."

He even respectfully delivered himself of this opinion to the
inventor--to Toandoah, with the hungry look of loss in his eye, which
occasionally wrought Pemrose to the point of choking sobs and to
clenching her fists at the mysterious robber.

And he repeated it, with elaborations, did Andrew, on the second June
morning after the loss when Professor Lorry, declaring that it would
take a year to search every foot of Greylock Peak, and that he was not
going to waste time in crying over spilt milk, went down the mountain
with his young assistant and Mr. Grosvenor, who had business in the
valley, to procure materials for another experiment--although not on the
same scale as the first--the girls being left behind with the landlady
of the little mountain inn where they were staying.

The chauffeur wore a "dour" look as he saw them depart, Una's father
driving his own car; for the first time in all his well-trained service,
the true-penny was inclined to sulk over being told to keep an eye on
two "daft lassies", who refused to go down to the town, bec