Ernie has distinguished herself again. How can she be so naughty, and never mean any harm! This time Geoffrey is implicated, too, but I can only do justice to the affair by constructing it from the beginning, piecing together the details as we learned them in yesterday evening’s soul-thrilling confessional.

It seems that the two children were bitterly disappointed a week ago Tuesday when they searched the cuckoo-clock for the lost contract, and found nothing more exciting than a deserted mouse’s nest.

“I call it a giddy sell,” remarked Ernie, so near to tears that Geof was honestly concerned. “No matter how good you try to be, nor how much you try to help, everything turns against you.”

“Oh, cheer up,” said Geoffrey. Ernie never looks more bewitching than when her blue eyes swim behind a veil of suspended woe. “What’s the good of worrying, Bunnie?”

“I guess you’d worry,” returned Ernie, dolefully, “if Georgie were sick, and your family were poor, and you were responsible for making them more so! It’s all very well to say ‘cheer up,’ Geoffrey Graham, and I’m sure I do most of the time, but this afternoon I want to do something really useful.”

“Well then, see here,” says Geof, a bright idea striking him all of a sudden. “I’ve got a plan. Come up to the workshop again, where we won’t be interrupted, and I’ll tell you.”

“Is it something in which I can help?” asked Ernie, doubtfully.

“It’s a pretty big undertaking,” answered Geof, closing the workshop door mysteriously. “I don’t believe a girl has ever been concerned in such an affair before;—but, see here, why shouldn’t you and I together perfect Uncle Dudley’s flying-machine?”

“Geoffrey!” cried Ernie, with sparkling eyes. “Could we? truly, do you think?”

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t,” answered Geof, seriously. “I’ve thought a lot about the matter, without supposing I’d ever have the chance to put it to the test. I’ve taken the motor out, and examined it. It is certainly a stunner; and the steering apparatus seems simple enough. You say Uncle Dudley really made one ascension?”

“Not exactly,” qualified Ernie. “The machine didn’t rise any distance at all. Father was dreadfully disappointed. But later he cheered up and said there was just one little detail that stood between him and ‘a complete solution of the problem of aËrial navigation.’ I remember his very words, and how excited we all were.”

“That is what I have always understood,” answered Geof. “Uncle would have perfected the thing if he had lived long enough. It’s magnificent to contemplate,—and a beastly shame to think of the fruits of his genius lying up here rusting in a totally unknown attic! Why can’t you and I take the matter up where he left it, find out the root of the trouble,—just one little detail, you say,—and let Mr. Perry and his old dump-carts go hang?” It isn’t often that Geof waxes eloquent. When he does he is worth listening to.

“We can! we can!” jubilated Ernie, clapping her hands. “Oh, Geof, it’s a splendid scheme! Why has no one thought of it before?”

“I have thought of it, often,” answered Geoffrey; “but somehow, up to to-day, it seemed impossible. What you’ve just told me throws an entirely new light on the matter, and I think we are justified at least in trying.”

“And if we don’t succeed,” says Ernie, “nobody need know anything about it.”

“That’s so,” answered Geof. “We’ll have to do a lot of hard studying and thinking, and we’ll keep the thing a deadly secret;—but I tell you, if we do make it go, it will be worth while!”

And so the conspirators set to work. For a week they ransacked father’s library, reading up on aËronautics generally, studying every pamphlet and authority they could lay their hands on. There was one thing that especially confused them. Each man supported a “totally different theory,” as Ernie plaintively complained. It was extremely trying, especially as dear father had worked almost entirely in his head, leaving very few directions or specifications to guide them to the right trail. At last Geof declared that he thought they would never get anywhere through books; that their one hope lay in practical experiment. Ernie quite agreed with him, and after that they spent hours in the airship, mastering as they supposed the intricate details of motor, steering apparatus, and machinery. Geoffrey even discovered what he considered a slight error in the automatic system of shifting weights. Finally, last Saturday morning, behind closed doors, the motor was taken out and started up. It ran like a dream. They came to the bold conclusion that nothing remained to hinder an experimental ascension!

All this time it must be understood mother and I had not the faintest suspicion as to what was going on. We knew that there was “a secret” in the workshop, “a beautiful surprise for the family.” Just how great a surprise, however, we neither of us dreamed.

Yesterday afternoon was the time set for the ascension. How the two children managed alone to raise the heavy machine from the workshop floor to the roof by means of the trap-door and pulleys father had used in the previous experiment will always remain a mystery. But they did! At last it stood among the chimney-pots, with rakish sails and scarred sides, looking for all the world like “a tipsy eagle-bird,” as Ernie enthusiastically declared. Even by this time neither of the little idiots seems to have had the least realisation of what it was they were attempting. On the contrary, they were quite wild with the frolic and excitement of the thing.

Geof straightened out the sails, and opened the manoeuvre valve. Tick-tock, sounded the motor. The framework quivered response.

“Hold on there,” shouted Geoffrey, as he ran to attach the short length of anchor line to a hook in the stone coping at the front of the roof. “Don’t get in yet, Ernie. The place in the middle belongs to me. I’ve got to manage the steering gear.”

“All right,” Ernie answered, climbing over the side, nevertheless. “I’m just looking to see which of these levers starts her.”

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.

Here high comedy reigned rampant, if any one had been in a mood to appreciate the fact. Two policemen, one stout and red-faced, the other tall and thin, beat down the block, their eyes aloft, bawling impossible directions. A butcher’s boy, followed by a gang of enthusiastic street urchins, had clambered to the roof of his cart, and moving slowly along directly beneath the labouring machine, rose ever and again in a series of ungainly but agile leaps, clutching hopefully at the surrounding atmosphere. In the area-ways, and gathered on the neighbouring stoops, were groups of excited people. Rose, escaped from the kitchen, had climbed the hydrant in front of our house, where, supported by Mrs. Hancock, she maintained a perilous equilibrium, the while she waved a red cotton lunch cloth and bellowed,—

“Whar yer boun’ fer, Miss Ernie? Fer de Law’s sake tell us whar yer boun’ fer?”

While Miss Brown, her head wrapped in her pink knitted shawl, ran back and forth, clucking like a distraught hen.

“Is she any relation to you, mum?” the red-faced policeman demanded of mother, jerking his thumb severely skyward as he spoke.

“My daughter,” came the distracted response.

“Then call her down,” commanded the minion of the law. “Oi can’t have such goin’s-on on my beat!”

“She doesn’t know how to manage the machine,” mother said. “At any moment it may fall with her. What is to be done?”

“Hi, Bill! ring in an al-lar-rum,—fer the hook-an’-ladder comp’ny, and an amberlance!” shouted the policeman to his mate at the corner.

At the same moment the airship, as if instinct with demoniacal life, ceased for an appreciable instant its laboured progress, began to nose the air uncertainly, and then in a short series of jerky swoops rose, again and again, to an altitude of some hundred feet or so. There it poised, came about in its sweep, rose once more, and finally began to settle with steadily increasing velocity.

We stood spellbound. One could literally hear the breathing of the crowd. The suspense was too horrible. Ernie—our darling Ernie! Could nothing be done to save her?

“’Ware below there!” shouted the taller of the two policemen.

And just then the bow of the ship grazed the roof of the corner house past which it was dropping. There sounded a familiar tick-tock. The machine started off in a new direction, bumping along the house-fronts, till finally with a shock of tearing wood and a crash of splintered glass it succeeded in bunting its way half through a second-story window, midway of the block. Where it lodged!

A distinct gasp of relief escaped from the crowd,—followed by a feebly started cheer, which rose and swelled in volume as with clang of bell and clatter of flying hoofs the hook-and-ladder company swung round the corner of the street and bore down upon us.

The next few moments passed for me in a confused sort of dream. When I finally came to myself I found that I was sitting on the lowest step leading up to the house in the window of which the airship was lodged. Miss Brown sat beside me, firmly clasping her own hand, the while she murmured,—

“We mustn’t faint, my love. We mustn’t! If your dear mother can stand the strain, everybody else should gladly!”

The firemen and policemen were gathered in an official group in the gutter, and around them sported and pranced a delighted bunch of street-boys. Mother had disappeared.

In another moment the house door opened, and a whitecapped maid came down the stairs to say to me,—

“Your mamma wishes you to go home to your little brother now, miss. The young lady is quite safe inside. They will follow when the crowd has gone. My! what a fright we’ve had. That there flying-airship-machine not only broke the window, but tore out the sash! I thought it was Judgment Day.”

Well, somehow I managed to get home, where I clasped trembling little Robin in my arms.

“What has happened, Ellie?” he sobbed.

“Ernie went flying, honey,” I answered, and looked at the clock. The whole incident had passed in exactly thirteen minutes! If I had not the evidence of my own eyes I should never believe it.

Finally the excitement subsided. The crowd gradually dispersed. Ernie, in a quelled and chastened frame of mind, her hand clasped tight in mother’s, returned.

They brought sad news of the flying-machine. It seems that while the policemen and hook-and-ladder crew still stood discussing the best method of bringing it down,—perhaps some three minutes after my departure from the scene,—the motor again started up, the car took a last fatal leap backward, and fell two stories to the street,—where it was shattered into so much kindling wood. Which goes to show just how much we have to be thankful for!

“Oh dear!” grieved Ernie, plaintively. “Who could have suspected our surprise would turn out so! Where’s Geoffrey? Has anybody seen him?”

It appeared upon investigation that Geof had been to the basement-door to inquire “if all were well within.” He was very white and wild-looking, Rose said, and seemed ashamed to come in.

I should have liked it better if he had come and faced mother on the spot; but instead he sneaked off home,—Geof is certainly a queer fellow in some ways,—and that evening confessed the whole affair to Uncle George, asking for money to pay whatever damages we are responsible for, and legal protection for himself and Ernie. For he imagined that they were in some way publicly liable, and might be arrested at any moment.

Uncle George was very angry, the more so since any display of inventive activity on Geoffrey’s part is extremely distasteful to him. He called upon mother this morning to acquire further details, and remarked with a flourish of his cane that he had “thrashed Geof soundly.”

Uncle George is always primitive, and generally mother disapproves of his methods; but this time she returned, with a flash of her maternal eye, that “it was just what Geoffrey needed.” Nevertheless, she herself believes in what might be called “reformatory” punishments. So Ernie took her dinner in bed last night, where she would have plenty of time to think, while we answered the questions of the boarders, and Haze interviewed quite a string of enterprising reporters on her behalf! He really managed rather well, I fancy, and finally convinced them that there was not much of a “story.”

The matter, however, did not end there for Ernie; for this afternoon when she came home from school mother called her into the nursery, and pointing to the pretty plaid dress on which she had been working when the excitement began, remarked,—

“My dear, since you are so anxious to be helpful I shall let you finish your dress yourself. The material is cut, and the lining basted. I will give whatever directions you may need, but dressmaking is not nearly so difficult an art as the construction of flying-machines. Besides, if you are busy with your needle, I shall not worry about you.”

Poor Ernie! her face was a study. She simply hates sewing. “It makes her toes prick,” she says. Also, it will mean giving up all her playtime for weeks to come, and she must be careful and not botch, since she will have to wear the result of her labours.

On the whole, I think her punishment was even more severe than Geoffrey’s. But neither of the culprits complains. Rather they glide about the house in such a beatific state of Christian humility that one knows it cannot last.

“I don’t believe in hitting a fellow when he’s down,” remarked Haze to me this evening. “But I’m glad they realise what they’ve done. Apart from the frightful publicity of the thing, I miss the flying-machine. There is nothing to keep the draughts off my head at night, and the workshop is not what it was!”