him, and was seized with a discreditable ambition to kill it. He
pursued it, briskly with unpleasant cries. It crossed the road
obliquely, splashed into a pail of milk upon a stall, and slapped
its milky tail athwart a motor-car load of factory girls halted
outside the town gates. They screamed loudly. People looked up
and saw Bert making what he meant to be genial salutations, but
what they considered, in view of the feminine outcry, to be
insulting gestures. Then the car hit the roof of the gatehouse
smartly, snapped a flag staff, played a tune upon some telegraph
wires, and sent a broken wire like a whip-lash to do its share in
accumulating unpopularity. Bert, by clutching convulsively, just
escaped being pitched headlong. Two young soldiers and several
peasants shouted things iup to him and shook fists at him and
began to run in pursuit as he disappeared over the wall into the
town.

Admiring rustics, indeed!

The balloon leapt at once, in the manner of balloons when part of
their weight is released by touching down, with a sort of
flippancy, and in another moment Bert was over a street crowded
with peasants and soldiers, that opened into a busy
market-square. The wave of unfriendliness pursued him.

"Grapnel," said Bert, and then with an afterthought shouted,
"TETES there, you! I say! I say! TETES. 'Eng it!"

The grapnel smashed down a steeply sloping roof, followed by an
avalanche of broken tiles, jumped the street amidst shrieks and
cries, and smashed into a plate-glass window with an immense and