RWIN ST. LEGER.'

Billy did not have to show this letter to his mother, because she had
gone away for the day, so he did not have to explain to her what a
beast he had been. If he had had to do this, it would have been part of
what is called Expiation.

Then he got the farm men to go out in every direction, furnished with a
full description of Harold's silkworm-like appearance, and Billy
borrowed a bicycle from a noble-hearted butcher's boy in the village and
set out for Plymouth, because that seemed the likeliest place to look in
for a cousin who was running away disguised as a stowaway. The wind blew
straight towards the sea, and it occurred to Billy--he deserves to be
called Billy now, I think--that the great patent kite, which was ten
feet high, would drag him along like winking if he could only set it
flying, and then tie it to the handle-bar of the bicycle. It was rather
a ticklish business to get the kite up, but the butcher's boy helped--he
had a noble heart--and at last it was done. Billy saw the great
bird-kite flying off towards Plymouth. He hastily knotted the string to
the bicycle handle, held the slack of it in his hand, mounted, started,
paid out the slack of the string, and the next moment the string was
tight, and the kite was pulling Billy and the bicycle along the
Plymouth road at the rate of goodness-only-knows-how-improbably many
miles an hour.

At last he came to the outskirts of Plymouth. I shall not tell you what
Plymouth was like, because Billy did not notice or know at all what it
was like, and there is no reason why you should. Plymouth seemed to
Billy very much like other places. The only odd thing was that he could
not stop his bicycle, though he pulled in the kite string as hard as he
could. He flew through the town. All the traffic stopped to let him
steer his mad-paced machine through the streets, and tradespeople, and
people walking on business, and people walking for pleasure, all stopped
with their respectable mouths wide open to stare at Billy on his
bicycle. And the kite pulled the machine on and on without pause, and at
a furious rate, and Billy, in despair, was just feeling in his pocket
for his knife to cut the string, when some mighty sky-wind seemed to
catch the kite, and it gave a leap and went twenty times as fast as it
had gone before, and the bicycle had to go twenty times as fast too, and
before Billy could say 'Jack Robinson,' or even 'J. R.,' for short, the
kite rushed