was too retarding from the plaster of Paris, but the case would be
very different if the ceiling were coated with ice." As it was _not_,
he changed his plan. The true secret, he now discovered, was this: he
would consider himself in the light of a humming top; he would make
an apparatus (and he made it) for having himself launched, like a top,
upon the ceiling, and regularly spun. Then the vertiginous motion of
the human top would overpower the force of gravitation. He should, of
course, spin upon his own axis, and sleep upon his own axis--perhaps
he might even dream upon it; and he laughed at "those scoundrels, the
flies," that never improved in their pretended art, nor made any thing
of it. The principle was now discovered; "and, of course," he said,
if a man can keep it up for five minutes, what's to hinder him from
doing so for five months?" "Certainly, nothing that I can think of,"
was the reply of my sister, whose scepticism, in fact, had not settled
upon the five months, but altogether upon the five minutes. The
apparatus for spinning him, however, perhaps from its complexity, would
not work--a fact evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. On
reconsidering the subject, he announced, to the disappointment of some
amongst us, that, although the physical discovery was now complete,
he saw a moral difficulty. It was not a _humming_ top that was required,
but a peg top. Now, this, in order to keep up the _vertigo_ at full
stretch, without which, to a certainty, gravitation would prove too
much for him, needed to be whipped incessantly. But that was precisely
what a gentleman ought not to tolerate: to be scourged unintermittingly
on the legs by any grub of a gardener, unless it were father Adam
himself, was a thing that he could not bring his mind to face. However,
as some compensation, he proposed to improve the art of flying, which
was, as every body must acknowledge, in a condition disgraceful to
civilized society. As he had made many a fire balloon, and had succeeded
in some attempts at bringing down cats by _parachutes_, it was not