y
tomb; and to prove to Bob how far he was astray, I gave a little impulse
from my toes. Up I soared like a bird, my companion soaring at my side.
As high as to the stone, and then higher, I pursued my impotent and
empty flight. Even when the strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders,
my heels continued their ascent; so that I blew out side-ways like an
autumn leaf, and must be hauled in, hand over hand, as sailors haul in
the slack of a sail, and propped upon my feet again like an intoxicated
sparrow. Yet a little higher on the foundation, and we began to be
affected by the bottom of the swell, running there like a strong breeze
of wind. Or so I must suppose; for, safe in my cushion of air, I was
conscious of no impact; only swayed idly like a weed, and was now borne
helplessly abroad, and now swiftly--and yet with dream-like
gentleness--impelled against my guide. So does a child's balloon
divagate upon the currents of the air, and touch and slide off again
from every obstacle. So must have ineffectually swung, so resented their
inefficiency, those light crowds that followed the Star of Hades, and
uttered exiguous voices in the land beyond Cocytus.

There was something strangely exasperating, as well as strangely
wearying, in these uncommanded evolutions. It is bitter to return to
infancy, to be supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon your
feet, by the hand of some one else. The air besides, as it is supplied to
you by the busy millers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes and
keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown so
dry that he can swallow no longer. And for all these reasons--although I
had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my surroundings, and longed, and
tried, and always failed, to lay hands on the fish that darted here and
there about me, swift as humming-birds--yet I fancy I was rather relieved
than otherwise when Bain brought me back to the ladder and signed to me
to mount. And there was one more experience before me even then. Of a
sudden, my ascending head passed into the trough of a swell. Out of the
green, I shot at once into a glory of rosy, almost of sanguine light--the
multitudinous seas incarnadined, the heaven above a vault of crimson. And
then the glory faded into the hard, ugly daylight of a Caithness autumn,
with a low sky, a grey sea, and a whistling wind.

Bob Bain had five shillings for his trouble, and I had done what I
desired. It was one of th