wide bowknot of my sash. Then they put a
cloth dingus over my face and a voice of authority told me to breathe.
That advice, however, was superfluous and might just as well have
been omitted, for such was my purpose anyhow. Ever since I can recall
anything at all, breathing has been a regular habit with me. So I
breathed. And, at that, a bottle of highly charged sarsaparilla exploded
somewhere in the immediate vicinity and most of its contents went up my
nose.

I started to tell them that somebody had been fooling with their ether
and adulterating it, and that if they thought they could send me off to
sleep with soda pop they were making the mistake of their lives, because
it just naturally could not be done; but for some reason or other
I decided to put off speaking about the matter for a few minutes. I
breathed again--again--agai----

I was going away from there. I was in a large gas balloon, soaring up
into the clouds. How pleasant!... No, by Jove! I was not in a balloon--I
myself was the balloon, which was not quite so pleasant. Besides, Doctor
Z was going along as a passenger; and as we traveled up and up he kept
jabbing me in the midriff with the ferrule of a large umbrella which
he had brought along with him in case of rain. He jabbed me harder and
harder. I remonstrated with him. I told him I was a bit tender in that
locality and the ferrule of his umbrella was sharp. He would not listen.
He kept on jabbing me.

Something broke! We started back down to earth. We fell faster and
faster. We fell nine miles, and after that I began to get used to it.
Then I saw the earth beneath and it was rising up to meet us.

A town was below--a town that grew larger and larger as we neared it.
I could make out the bonded indebtedness, and the Carnegie Library,
and the moving-picture palaces, and the new dancing parlor, and other
principal points of interest.

At the rate we were falling we were certainly going to make an awful
splatter in that town when we hit. I was sorry for the street-cleaning
department.

We fell another half mile or so. A spire was sticking up into the sky
directly beneath us, like a spear, to impale us. By a supreme effort I
twisted out of the way of that spire, only to strike squarely on top of
the roof of a greenhouse back of the parsonage, next door. We crashed
through it with a perfectly terrific clatter of breaking glass and
landed in a bed of white flowers, all soft and downy, like feathers.