ht as the top of these rocks?"--"You will always," replies she,
"make the height a part of your difficulty in flying; but you are
deceived, for as the first stroke (I have heard you say often) in
fighting is half the battle, so it is in flying; get but once fairly on
the wind, nothing can hurt you afterwards. My method, let me tell you,
was this; I climbed to the highest part of the ship, where I could stand
clear, having first put up my burden, which you have there; and then
getting that on my back near my shoulders, I took the two cords you see
hang loose to it in my two hands, and extending my graundee, leaped off
flatwise with my face towards the water; when instantly playing two or
three good strokes with my graundee, I was out of danger; now, if I
had found the bundle too heavy to make my first strokes with, I should
directly have turned on my back, dropped my bundle, and floated in my
graundee to the ship again, as you once saw me float on the lake." Says
I, "You must have flown a prodigious distance to the lake, for I was
several days sailing, I believe three weeks, from my ship, before I
reached the gulf; and after that could be little less than five weeks
(as I accounted for it), and at a great rate of sailing too under the
rock, before I reached the lake; so that the ship must be a monstrous
way off." "No, no," says she, "your ship lies but over yon cliff, that
rises as it were with two points; and as to the rock itself, it is not
broader than our lake is long; but what made you so tedious in your
passage was many of the windings and turnings in the cavern returning
in to themselves again; so that you might have gone round and round
till this time, if the tide had not luckily struck you into the direct
passage: this," says she, "I have heard from some of my countrymen, who
have flown up it, but could never get quite through."

"I wish with all my heart," says I, "fortune had brought me first to
light in this country; or (but for your sake I could almost say) had
never brought me into it at all; for to be a creature of the
least significancy, of the whole race but one, is a melancholy
circumstance."--"Fear not," says she, "my love, for you have a wife will
hazard all for you, though you are restrained; and as my inclinations
and affections are so much yours, that I need but know your desires
to execute them as far as my power extends, surely you, who can act by
another, may be content to forego the trouble of y