An old gentleman in Guilsborough had an extremely narrow escape.  Being warned on no account to practise flying in the house or garden, lest his grandchildren should see him and want to do the same, he retired to the seclusion of an old, disused and dilapidated coach house.  Here, in the upper storey, he practised by the hour together.  He climbed on to a stool which he had taken there for the purpose, and when he fancied he had acquired the right amount of concentration, he sprang into the air, arriving, presumably through want of will power, on the floor.  For two whole days he practised—­bump—­bump—­bump—­and the more he bumped, the more he persevered.  At last, however, the floor gave way, and with loud cries of “I will!  I will!” he fell on the ground floor, ten feet below!  He was unable to go on experimenting, owing to a broken leg and a fractured collar-bone.

In Aylsham, Norfolk, there had been a perfect epidemic among the children for trying aeronic gravity.  Rudolph Crabbe, aged five, after listening to an account of the performances at the Modern Sorcery Company’s Hall, which his father had read aloud, sprang off the dining-room table crying out “I will fly!  I will stay in the air.”  Fortunately, he fell on the tabby cat, which somewhat broke the shock of concussion, and he escaped unhurt.

In College Road, Clifton, Bristol, an octogenarian thinking he would add novelty to the Jubilee celebrations at the College, leaped off the roof of his house, crying, “I’ll fly over the Close!  I will fly over the Close!”—­and broke his neck.

In St. Ives, Cornwall, where the treatment of animals is none too humane, a fisher-boy threw a visitor’s Pomeranian over the Malakoff saying, “You shall fly!  You shall remain in the air;” whilst at Bath a girl of ten, snatching her baby brother from the perambulator, leaped over Beechen Cliff, calling out, “We will fly together!  We will fly together!”

These are only a few of the many similar cases Shiel read in the paper, and which he narrated afterwards to Gladys Martin.

“I am quite convinced,” Gladys said, “that Kelson does his flying through supernatural agency.  His assertion that it can be done through mere will power, is sheer humbug.  It wouldn’t be a bad idea to consult a clairvoyant.  What do you think?”

Shiel thought it was an excellent suggestion.  He saw in it an opportunity of spending yet another afternoon in Gladys’s company, and asked her to go with him to an occultist the very next day.  When she assented, the pleasure of it tingled through every pore of his skin.  Of course, Gladys assured herself there was no harm in her acceptance of Shiel’s escort—­that neither he nor she meant anything by it—­that it was on her part merely a sort of an acknowledgment that he had been awfully good to her in her present predicament.  Besides, if she needed further excuse, she had no reason for supposing Shiel to be in love with her—­and had her father not spoken to her about it, she would not have remarked anything different in his glances, from the glances—­for the time being, perhaps, earnest enough—­bestowed upon her by other young men; which excuse, was, certainly, in Gladys’s case, a more or less honest one.