Percival bawled: "We don't want the brake! I can't reach the brake! I like it! We're simply whizzing! Mind your legs!" His cap was gone. His hair fluttered in the rushing wind. His face was crimson with excited glee. His clear laughter on its strong note of "Ha! Ha! Ha!" rose high above the rattling of all the machine's vitals and the cries of the agonised bearer of the fly. He clung tightly to the podgy waist and shouted: "Ha! Ha! Ha! We're whizzing! We're whizzing!" Mr. Purdie took another six hammers on his legs and struck a note of new alarm. "I'm blind, you know! I can't see! I can't steer!" "A straight road!" Percival bawled. "Look out, though! A corner coming!" "How can I look out? Draggle your legs on the ground!" "Twiddle to the left!" Percival bellowed. "Ha! Ha! Ha! Twiddle, Mr. Purdie, twiddle!" Mr. Purdie twiddled frantically; the tricycle outraced his efforts. "Look out for yourself!" from Percival, and with a loud and exceeding bitter cry from Mr. Purdie, the machine plunged at the hedge, planted Mr. Purdie very firmly into the midst, shot Percival firmly on top of him, took a violent somersault across the ditch that skirted the hedge, and poised itself above them. Mr. Purdie's last despairing cry cut sharply across Percival's peals of laughter--then the crash. The fluttering beat of wings as a cloud of chaffinches, terrified by this amazing avalanche, burst from the floor of the wood beyond the hedge, then peal on peal of laughter again from Percival. In muffled tones from the depth of the hedge: "It is a miracle we are not killed. Where are you, Percival?" Percival checked his mirth sufficiently to reply: "Well, I don't know _where_ I am! My head is down here, but where my legs are I don't know." "One of them is under me and hurting me terribly. Move, please." Between the peals of laughter: "I can't move, Mr. Purdie. I'm practically standing on my head, you know." "I don't know anything about it. My face is almost in something highly unpleasant--a dead bird, I think. Please stop that laughter and try to do something. The odour here is most noisome." "Well, but I can't stop laughing. Did you see us shoot?" "Please try to control yourself. I did not see us shoot." A mighty effort causes Percival's head and shoulders to come up with a jerk; Mr. Purdie feels the weight of pupil and tricycle removed from his back, and there follows another crash and further yells of laughter. In muffled agony from the hedge: "Now what has happened?" "Well, I'm bothered if I haven't fallen again! I've fallen out, though." Out of the depths: "Percival! Percival! Don't be such a silly little boy! Pull me out!" "Well, I'm all mixed up in this awful trike, you know. Now, I'm up!" "Pray pull me, then. I am retching with this noisome smell." "Well, there's nothing to pull!" cries Percival, plunging round the tremendous stern that sticks out of the hedge. "Your trousers are simply _tight_!"