much taken by surprise to think of the proper cause of the
report. I don't even know what I made of it. I was obsessed, I suppose,
by that perpetual dread of the modern aeronaut, a flash between engine
and balloon. Yet obviously I wasn't wrapped in flames. I ought to have
realised instantly it wasn't that. I did, at any rate, whatever other
impressions there were, release the winding of the outer net and let the
balloon expand again, and that no doubt did something to break my fall.
I don't remember doing that. Indeed, all I do remember is the giddy
effect upon the landscape of falling swiftly upon it down a flat spiral,
the hurried rush of fields and trees and cottages on my left shoulder
and the overhung feeling as if the whole apparatus was pressing down
the top of my head. I didn't stop or attempt to stop the screw. That was
going on, swish, swish, swish all the time.

Cothope really knows more about the fall than I do. He describes the
easterly start, the tilt, and the appearance and bursting of a sort
of bladder aft. Then down I swooped, very swiftly, but not nearly so
steeply as I imagined I was doing. "Fifteen or twenty degrees," said
Cothope, "to be exact." From him it was that I learnt that I let the
nets loose again, and so arrested my fall. He thinks I was more in
control of myself than I remember.

But I do not see why I should have forgotten so excellent a resolution.
His impression is that I was really steering and trying to drop into
the Farthing Down beeches. "You hit the trees," he said, "and the whole
affair stood on its nose among them, and then very slowly crumpled up.
I saw you'd been jerked out, as I thought, and I didn't stay for more. I
rushed for my bicycle."

As a matter of fact, it was purely accidental that I came down in the
woods. I am reasonably certain that I had no more control then than a
thing in a parcel. I remember I felt a sort of wincing, "Now it comes!"
as the trees rushed up to me. If I remember that, I should remember
steering. Then the propeller smashed, everything stopped with a jerk,
and I was falling into a mass of yellowing leaves, and Lord Roberts A,
so it seemed to me, was going back into the sky.

I felt twigs and things hit me in the face, but I didn't feel injured
at the time; I clutched at things that broke, tumbled through a froth
of green and yellow into a shadowy world of great bark-covered arms, and
there, snatching wildly, got a grip on a fair round branch,