And then,—no one will ever know how it happened, Geoffrey had his back turned, Ernie can’t explain,—there was a whiz, a whirr, deep in the interior regions of the old airship, a sudden tug on the mooring-line that sent Geof sprawling into the tin gutter, and with a swoop, entirely unprecedented, I believe, in the whole history of aërial ascensions, the apparatus had risen, perhaps some twenty feet! The voyage was begun. Ernie, alone in the flying-machine, circled and jibed above the chimney-pots! Geof, regaining his feet, made one desperate grab for the safety-line. It slipped through his fingers, and swung to the left,—just out of reach beyond the stone coping. “_Aunt Peggy! Aunt Peggy!_” he then bawled with such a panic of woe in his voice that mother, who had been sewing on Ernie’s new school-dress in the nursery while I read aloud to her and Robin from _Tanglewood Tales_, dropped her work to the floor and fled up the attic stairs. I followed at top speed. Geof’s face, thrust on a long neck through the trap-door in the roof, stared whitely down upon us. His eyes and mouth were wide. He looked for all the world like a terror-stricken gargoyle. “Ernie!” he gasped. “She got away from me. _She’s flying!_” “Geoffrey!” says mother, stern as any Spartan, “are you mad?” “No! no!” protested Geof. “Put your head out the window. You’ll see her! I tried to hold her down, but——” “The flying-machine!” I cried, with one distraught, comprehensive look about the dismantled workshop. At that moment a clamour rose to us from the street below. “Have yez got er license?” bawled an infuriated Irish voice. “Come down out ov thot. I arr-rest yez!” “It’s only a kid girl,” sang a shrill chorus of gamins. “I seen her petticoats!” In another instant mother and I were on the roof, straining over the stone coping. Some fifteen feet below us, about on a level with the nursery window now, sailed Ernie. She sat quite rigid in the car, which laboured and beat a curiously straight course between the two rows of houses directly down the middle of the street. We could hear the _tick-tock_ of the motor and the excited comments of the crowd. “Ernie!” I cried. “Oh, Ernie!” Ernie’s pallid countenance was raised to us. “_Good-bye, mother dear!_” she wailed in plaintive crescendo. “_Give my pinky ring to Mary Hobart, and——_” Mother turned. For a moment I thought she was going to jump off the roof. But instead she sped, Geof and I at her heels,—it wasn’t running, it wasn’t flying,—down the ladder through the workshop, down two flights of stairs to the second story, where, throwing up a window, she reached out in a vain attempt to grasp the short length of dangling anchor-line. But already it was too late. The car and the crowd had passed by. “This is terrible!” we gasped, and fled for the street.