The queerest thing, though, was that the feeling of fear had left me completely. I felt exhilarated and happy, and immensely proud of myself. I began to sing and shout at the top of my lungs, while the engine thundered above me and the vibrating wires whistled and whined. But with every passing minute my arms and legs were growing more tired from the task of keeping a stationary position on the axle. I remember thinking that soon I would be too tired to hold on any longer, and then I would go tumbling head over heels down through a few thousand feet of empty space. However, it seemed too fantastic for me to be frightened. Falling off the roof of our barn would be every bit as scary, I thought. * * * * * Suddenly the plane started back toward earth in a crazy, sickening rush, and with a speed that all but tore me loose from my precarious perch. It was surely all over with me, I decided, and shut my eyes, lost in a horrible swirling nausea. But instinctively, I hugged the strut in a regular death-grip. I dropped into bottomless abysses and suffered such terrifically violent changes of direction that up-and-down and sideways were all scrambled together into one hodgepodge of tipsy motion. When I opened my eyes, I found that the earth and the sky had changed places in an extraordinary sort of waltz they were dancing with each other, and once it looked as if we were falling straight into the sun. After that I kept my eyes tightly closed. The pilots were testing out the ship, putting it through every stunt it was capable of. Maneuvers which had looked so graceful and easy from the ground left me feeling much as though I had been a handball swiftly batted through the air by a company of playful giants. And when the plane looped, I felt I was being whirled about at the end of a long string, and that the string was slowly slipping out of my grasp. In fact, my grasp on the axle was weakening. Terror-stricken, I screamed again and again, but the wind wiped out my voice, and the men only four feet above me might have been that many miles away for any chance they had of hearing me. * * * * * After what seemed long and intolerable hours to me, the pilots throttled the engine down for an instant, and in the comparative quiet they must have heard my shouts. I opened my eyes again to see the top of a leather helmet leaning far out of the cockpit to peer under the wing. Immediately the plane slanted back toward the ground, keeping as even a keel as possible. One of the pilots leaned over once more to wave an encouraging hand at me, and in a few moments we landed safely in the middle of the field....