Again the throbbing blast came hurtling through the storm, and this time I noticed that, starting with a raucous bass note, it kept on rising in a sirenic crescendo until it was suddenly broken short, as though the air which drove it was cut off rather than exhausted. Turning down the high collar of my storm coat, I squirmed around and peered back over my shoulder in the direction of the “Thing of Terror,” but only an amorphous grey shape in the line of the opposite cable indicated the position of the other basket. It didn’t seem possible that a two-feet-wide-by-six-feet-long wire basket could possibly hold anything large enough to make a sound like that, and yet the fact that the cable at this point was five hundred feet or more in the air made it certain that the sound could come from nowhere else. A brisk shiver was running up and down my spine as I slithered down again in the bottom of the basket, but I told myself that it was from the cold and set my wits to work to find a “rational” explanation of the weird phenomenon. A great bird--perhaps an eagle--roosting on the cable? Impossible. Nothing on wings since the time of the “pterodactyl,” or whatever it was called, could have the lungpower for a wail like that. A fog-horn? Not a hundred miles from the sea. A--ah, I had it now! I told myself--gas-alarm signal out of order; Alpino taking it down to have that broken-off note put right--playing it for his own amusement. “What a fool I had been not to think of it before!” I said to myself as I settled back with a sigh of relief and an easy heart to wait for the “train to start.” When, after a half-hour wait, punctuated at pretty regular intervals by the wail of the “gas alert,” the gentle “tug-tug” began again, and the basket started on its way, I pulled myself up on my elbow to give the indefatigable serenader a hail in passing. Presently the “down” basket, filled with some sprawling shape, took form in the hard-driven snow, but it was not until it was almost upon me that I saw that the nose of a donkey, stretched a foot over the side, threatened to foul the side of my swaying car in passing. The vigorous punch of my mittened fist with which I fended it clear set another of those air-shivering blasts going, and I had just time to see, before the curtain of the snow dimmed down and swallowed up the fantastic sight, that the sudden cut-off I noticed at the end was caused by the swelling windpipe being brought into sharp contact with the side of the basket as the beast’s neck was stretched out to establish the proper air columns to form the sirenic higher notes.