sickening impact. The balloon rolled nauseatingly, and the car
pitched. But the grapnel had not held. It emerged at once
bearing on one fluke, with a ridiculous air of fastidious
selection, a small child's chair, and pursued by a maddened
shopman. It lifted its catch, swung about with an appearance of
painful indecision amidst a roar of wrath, and dropped it at last
neatly, and as if by inspiration, over the head of a peasant
woman in charge of an assortment of cabbages in the market-place.

Everybody now was aware of the balloon. Everybody was either
trying to dodge the grapnel or catch the trail rope. With a
pendulum-like swoop through the crowd, that sent people flying
right and left the grapnel came to earth again, tried for and
missed a stout gentleman in a blue suit and a straw hat, smacked
away a trestle from under a stall of haberdashery, made a
cyclist soldier in knickerbockers leap like a chamois, and
secured itself uncertainly among the hind-legs of a sheep--which
made convulsive, ungenerous efforts to free itself, and was
dragged into a position of rest against a stone cross in the
middle of the place. The balloon pulled up with a jerk. In
another moment a score of willing hands were tugging it
earthward. At the same instant Bert became aware for the first
time of a fresh breeze blowing about him.

For some seconds he stood staggering in the car, which now swayed
sickeningly, surveying the exasperated crowd below him and trying
to collect his mind. He was extraordinarily astonished at this
run of mishaps. Were the people really so annoyed? Everybody
seemed angry with him. No one seemed interested or amused by his
arrival. A disproportionate amount of the outcry had the flavour