It was Una--Una--who saw it first: the tiny speck of star-dust drifting down, down among the woolly clouds--dark as if the night had been shorn and its fleece hung out to dry--alighting here and there, the little firefly, in other words the atomy electric battery attached to the precious record, trying so hard, with the parachute's aid, to find its way back to earth from the lonely height it had reached. Another quarter of a minute, and they could trace the outline of the black silk parachute, itself, a drifting crow with their prize in its claws; that prize which the inventor, at least, would have given ten years of his life to grasp--if, grasping it, he could see that the little pencil had duly made its record markings--the proof that his Thunder Bird had "got there." "Glory halleluiah! it's drifting down right into our laps--into the old mountain's lap, rather! The wind won't carry it far, I bet! 'Twill land within quarter of a mile of us, anyhow," shrieked the professor's young assistant, a college boy, an athlete, who had led the quarter-mile sprint on many a hard-won field, when the racing honor of a school was at stake; and he ran as never before to get the better of the tricky gusts and seize the parachute--faster, even, than the nickum, that mysterious youth, had run, when he saved the day for the mountain team at baseball. "Hoot mon! Dinna ye let it get away frae ye into the dar-rk woods!" skirled Andrew, equally excited, and filled with awe of the raven parachute now springing, like a great, black mushroom, out of the night--and of the firefly which had been up so high. "Oh! it is--it is drifting towards the dark spruce woods--where we'll have hard work to find it." In the wild chase after the prize, Pemrose made a good third, as she thus shouted her fear. "See--oh! see, it _is_ landing," she cried again, "c-coming down--touching earth." Yes! for one fleeting instant it did alight upon a mound, the shooting starlet, the little electric dry cell, winking brilliantly against the background of somber evergreens, now dark as Erebus, that girdle old Greylock's crown. Then, freakish firefly, there, it was off again, the prey of the nickum gusts, before ever a hand could touch it--the black parachute rotating like a whirligig. Never--oh, never--was such a chase for such a prize since mountain was mountain and man was man! Once again the steely clog, the weight of the five-inch box containing the recording apparatus, the precious log, almost dragged it to a standstill! But the summit gusts were strong. Even the college boy began to have heart-quakes and Pemrose heart-sinkings. "Jove! What a stunt you're pulling off on us, you old black crow of a parachute--you booby-headed umbrella!" groaned he. "C-can't you stay put for just a second? Or are you bent on leading us a dance through the woods?"