south of their course, and he did not know exactly how to get back to
it. On the dark earth beneath he could see towns as blurs of light on
all sides of him, but no one of them was big enough to be Paris. He
let the machine swoop on down to five hundred feet, and up again. On
the upward course, from fifteen hundred feet he saw a great blur of
light on the northern horizon: it was Paris, and he was swooping past
it. He steered the machine round without taking the way off her, and
swooped down towards the city. At the end of the swoop he was already
over the suburbs, and he switched off the electric lamps. He took the
way off the machine by switching up the planes; and then, using only
the propeller, circled round, seeking for the Eiffel Tower. Presently
he saw it looming through the first dim grey light of the dawn, steered
over it, let fall a grapnel, and hooked it into the railings which ran
round it; took a turn of the rope round the windlass, and wound the
machine down to within twenty feet of the top. Then he went to the
financier, unroped him, and kicked him in the ribs ungently.

As he kicked, saying, "Get up! Get up!" an astonished voice below
cried, "Qui vive?"

Looking over the side of the car Tinker saw dimly the figure of a
gendarme, and said briskly, "Santos-Dumont!"

"Vive Santos-Dumont!" cried the gendarme with enthusiasm.

Tinker went back to the financier, and kicked him again.

"Where am I? Where am I?" he murmured faintly.

"On the top of the Eiffel Tower," said Tinker.

"What? Saved! Saved!" cried the financier, for all the world as
though he had been in a melodrama; and he sat up.

"I should like the five thousand pounds, please," said Tinker, brought
back by the touch of earth from his aerial dreams to cold reality.

"Five thousand pounds!" cried the financier, every faculty alert at the
mention of money. "No, no! How am I to get five thousand pounds?
Five hundred now! Five hundred pounds is an enormous sum--an enormous
sum for a little boy, or even fifty! Yes, yes; fifty!"

"That's really very tiresome," said Tinker very gently. "I never
thought you'd be so foolish as to leave all that money in empty rooms
in an hotel. Well, well, we must fly straight back and get it. I hope
we shall have as good luck as we had coming over." And he turned to
the levers.

"Here! here! here!" screamed the financier; tore a button off his coat
in his haste to get at his breast pocket; w