at
a height finds his muscles as hard to control as a penman writing with
his left hand for the first time. He cannot even see straight until his
eyes learn to gage distances and the relation of things presented upside
down.

With some pains and an awkward clutching at the braces I got myself back
into a sitting position, while Roy climbed again good-naturedly to his
starting-cradle. A trapeze performer must have infinite patience.

Again we tried the trick, and this time, as I hung expectant, I felt my
wrists clutched tight, and there was the agile leaper swinging back,
pendulum fashion, from my arms, then forward, then back, while the bar
strained under my knees.

"Now, throw him!" called Harry. "Stiffen out and chuck him back to Tom.
Now!"

Alas! I made a bungle of it. I could not give him send enough, and the
boy, falling short of Tom's arms, dangled from the "mechanic" lines
half-way down to the net. It was quite plain that more than good
intentions are needed to chuck young gentlemen through flights of
eighteen feet. I was feeling decidedly queer by this time--a sort of
half-way-over-the-Channel faintness, and could imagine what it must be
to work up here, right at the peak of a "big-top" tent, under the
scorch of an August sun, with the stifle of a great audience coming up
from below. I expressed a readiness to descend.

"Try a drop into the net," suggested Tom Potter. "See, hang by your
hands, like this. Keep your legs together and lift 'em out stiff.
Then--"

Down he went, and landed easily on his shoulders.

"Better put the 'mechanic' on him," said Harry, and presently young Roy
was beside me on the cradle, securing me to the drop-lines with a double
hitch.

"You want to be sure to lift yer legs," he remarked. "I knew a feller
that struck the net straight on his feet and broke his knees."

"Don't you worry," said Harry; "if you don't fall right, I'll hold you
with the 'mechanic.'"

Of course, when a man has started at this sort of thing he must see it
through, so I hung obediently by my hands, lifted my legs, and--

"Now," cried Harry, and instantly, before I had time to think or note
sensations, I was on my back in the net. And I understood what a
terrible problem it is for a gymnast, falling with such swiftness, to
turn two or three somersaults in the air and land with the body at just
the angle of safety, for a shade too much one way may mean a broken leg,
and a shade too much the other way