it has also been of the greatest injury indirectly to me and
mine, not to mention some direct inconvenience and danger, which I
will speak of another time. The secret lies with us three, and we
will keep it. But the invention itself is too full of temptation and
danger for any of us."

As I said this I held the knapsack with one hand while I quickly
turned the screw with the other. In a few moments it was high above
my head, while I with difficulty held it down by the straps. "Look!"
I cried. And then I released my hold, and the knapsack shot into the
air and disappeared into the upper gloom.

I was about to make a remark, but had no chance, for my wife threw
herself upon my bosom, sobbing with joy.

"Oh, I am so glad--so glad!" she said. "And you will never make
another?"

"Never another!" I answered.

"And now let us hurry in and see Janet," said my wife.

"You don't know how heavy and clumsy I feel," said Mr. Gilbert,
striving to keep up with us as we walked back. "If I had worn that
thing much longer, I should never have been willing to take it off!"

Janet had retired, but my wife went up to her room.

"I think she has felt it as much as our boy," she said, when she
rejoined me. "But I tell you, my dear, I left a very happy girl in
that little bedchamber over the garden."

And there were three very happy elderly people talking together
until quite late that evening. "I shall write to Herbert to-night,"
I said, when we separated, "and tell him to meet us all in Geneva.
It will do the young man no harm if we interrupt his studies just
now."

"You must let me add a postscript to the letter," said Mr. Gilbert,
"and I am sure it will require no knapsack with a screw in the back
to bring him quickly to us."

And it did not.

There is a wonderful pleasure in tripping over the earth like a
winged Mercury, and in feeling one's self relieved of much of that
attraction of gravitation which drags us down to earth and gradually
makes the movement of our bodies but weariness and labor. But this
pleasure is not to be compared, I think, to that given by the
buoyancy and lightness of two young and loving hearts, reunited
after a separation which they had supposed would last forever.

What became of the basket and the knapsack, or whether they ever met
in upper air, I do not know. If they but float away and stay away
from ken of mortal man, I shall be satisfied.

And whether or not the world will ever know more o