and faster. We fell nine miles, and after that I began to get
used to it. Then I saw the earth beneath and it was rising up to
meet us.

A town was below--a town that grew larger and larger as we neared
it. I could make out the bonded indebtedness, and the Carnegie
Library, and the moving-picture palaces, and the new dancing parlor,
and other principal points of interest.

At the rate we were falling we were certainly going to make an
awful splatter in that town when we hit. I was sorry for the
street-cleaning department.

We fell another half mile or so. A spire was sticking up into the
sky directly beneath us, like a spear, to impale us. By a supreme
effort I twisted out of the way of that spire, only to strike
squarely on top of the roof of a greenhouse back of the parsonage,
next door. We crashed through it with a perfectly terrific clatter
of breaking glass and landed in a bed of white flowers, all soft
and downy, like feathers.

And then Doctor Z stood up and combed the debris out of his whiskers
and remarked that, taking it by and large, it had been one of the
pleasantest little outings he had enjoyed in the entire course of
his practice. He said that as a patient I was fair, but as a
balloon I was immense. He asked me whether I had seen anything
of his umbrella and began looking round for it. I tried to help
him look, but I was too tired to exert myself much. I told him I
believed I would take a little nap.