shams, and perhaps the most uncandid, are to be
looked for among "publishers and printers," of whom, it seems, "the
great majority" are mere forgeries; a very few speak frankly about the
matter, and say they don't care who knows it, which, to my thinking, is
impudence; but by far the larger section doggedly deny it, and call a
policeman, if you persist in charging them with being shams. Some
differences there are between my brother and HIM, but in the great
outline of their views, they coincide.

This hypothesis, however, like a thousand others, when it happened that
they engaged no durable sympathy from his nursery audience, he did not
pursue. For some time, he turned his thoughts to philosophy, and read
lectures to us every night upon some branch or other of physics. This
undertaking arose upon some one of us envying or admiring flies for
their power of walking upon the ceiling. "Pooh!" he said, "they are
impostors; they pretend to do it, but they can't do it as it ought to be
done. Ah! you should see _me_ standing upright on the ceiling, with my
head downward, for half-an-hour together, and meditating profoundly." My
second sister remarked, that we should all be very glad to see him in
that position. "If that's the case," he replied, "it's very well that
all is ready, except as to one single strap." Being an excellent skater,
he had first imagined that, if held up until he had started, by taking a
bold sweep ahead, he might then keep himself in position through the
continued impetus of skating. But this he found not to answer, because,
as he observed, "the friction was too retarding from the plaster of
Paris, but the ease would be very different if the ceiling were coated
with ice." As it was _not_, he changed his plan. The true secret, he
said, 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
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 going on for five months?" "Certainly," my sister