ol!"

Whilst Monsieur Margot was venting his spleen in a scarcely articulate
mutter, we repaired to the lodge, knocked up the porter, communicated
the accident, and procured the ladder. However, an observant eye had
been kept upon our proceedings, and the window above was re-opened,
though so silently that I only perceived the action. The porter,
a jolly, bluff, hearty-looking fellow, stood grinning below with a
lantern, while we set the ladder (which only just reached the basket)
against the wall.

The chevalier looked wistfully forth, and then, by the light of
the lantern, we had a fair view of his ridiculous figure--his teeth
chattered woefully, and the united cold without and anxiety within,
threw a double sadness and solemnity upon his withered countenance;
the night was very windy, and every instant a rapid current seized the
unhappy sea-green vesture, whirled it in the air, and threw it, as if
in scorn, over the very face of the miserable professor. The constant
recurrence of this sportive irreverence of the gales--the high sides of
the basket, and the trembling agitation of the inmate, never too agile,
rendered it a work of some time for Monsieur Margot to transfer himself
from the basket to the ladder; at length, he had fairly got out one
thin, shivering leg.

"Thank God!" said the pious professor--when at that instant the
thanksgiving was checked, and, to Monsieur Margot's inexpressible
astonishment and dismay, the basket rose five feet from the ladder,
leaving its tenant with one leg dangling out, like a flag from a
balloon.

The ascent was too rapid to allow Monsieur Margot even time for an
exclamation, and it was not till he had had sufficient leisure in his
present elevation to perceive all its consequences, that he found words
to say, with the most earnest tone of thoughtful lamentation, "One could
not have foreseen this!--it is really extremely distressing--would to
God that I could get my leg in, or my body out!"

While we were yet too convulsed with laughter to make any comment upon
the unlooked-for ascent of the luminous Monsieur Margot, the basket
descended with such force as to dash the lantern out of the hand of the
porter, and to bring the professor so precipitously to the ground, that
all the bones in his skin rattled audibly!

"My God!" said he, "I am done for!--be witness how inhumanly I have been
murdered."

We pulled him out of the basket, and carried him between us into the
porter'