“Good-by, everybody!” he cries out, and the sinister possibilities in that phrase are overlooked in the wonder at seeing him lurch upward through the air, all glorious in black tights and yellow breech-clout. Up and up he soars above the tree-tops, and the wind gently wafts him along, a pendant to a dusky globe hanging in the sky. He is just a speck now swaying to and fro. The globe plunges upward; the pendant drops like a shot. There is a rustling sound. It is the intake of the breath of horror from ten thousand pairs of lungs. Look! Look! The edges of the parachute ruffle, and then it blossoms out like an opening flower. It bounces on the air a little, and rocking gently sinks like thistle-down behind the woods.
It is all over. The Fair is over. Let's go home. Isn't it wonderful though, what men can do? You'll see; they'll be flying like birds, one of these days. That's what we little boys think, but we overhear old Nate Wells say to Tom Slaymaker, as we pass them: “Well, I d' know. I d' know 's these here b'loon ascensions is worth the money they cost the 'Sociation. I seen so many of 'em, they don't interest me nummore. 'Less, o' course, sumpun should happen to the feller.”
CHRISTMAS BACK HOME
It was the time of year when the store windows are mighty interesting. Plotner's bakery, that away, 'way back in the summer-time, was an ice-cream saloon, showed a plaster man in the window, with long, white whiskers, in top boots and a brown coat and peaked hat, all trimmed with fur, and carrying a little pinetree with arsenical foliage. Over his head dangled a thicket of canes hanging by their crooks from a twine string stretched across. They were made of candy striped spirally in red and white. There were candy men and women in the window, and chocolate mice with red eyes, and a big cake, all over frosting, with a candy preacher on it marrying a candy man and lady. The little children stood outside, with their joggerfies, and arithmetics, and spellers, and slates bound in red flannel under their arms, and swallowed hard as they looked. Whenever anybody went in for a penny's worth of yeast and opened the door, that had a bell fastened to it so that Mrs. Plotner could hear in the back room, and come to wait on the customer, the smell of wintergreen and peppermint and lemonsticks and hot taffy gushed out so strong that they couldn't swallow fast enough, but stood there choking and dribbling at the mouth.
Brown's shoe store exhibited green velvet slippers with deers' heads on them, and Galbraith's windows were hung with fancy dressgoods, and handkerchiefs with dogs' heads in the corners; but, next to Plotner's, Case's drug-and-book store was the nicest. When you first went in, it smelled of cough candy and orris root, but pretty soon you could notice the smell of drums and new sleds, and about the last smell, (sort of down at the bottom of things) was the smell of new books, the fish-glue on the binding, and the muslin covers, and the printer's ink, and that is a smell that if it ever gets a good hold of you, never lets go. There were the “Rollo” books, and the “Little Prudy” books, and “Minnie and Her Pets,” and the “Elm Island” series, and the “Arabian Nights,” with colored pictures, and There were skates all curled up at the toes, and balls of red and black leather in alternate quarters, and China mugs, with “Love the Giver,” and “For a Good Boy” in gilt letters on them. Kind of Dutch letters they were. And there were dolls with black, shiny hair, and red cheeks, and blue eyes, with perfectly arched eyebrows. They had on black shoes and white stockings, with pink garters, and they almost always toed in a little. They looked so cold in the window with nothing but a “shimmy” on, and fairly ached to be dressed, and nursed, and sung to. The little girls outside the window felt an emptiness in the hollow of their left arms as they gazed. There was one big doll in the middle all dressed up. It had real hair that you could comb, and it was wax. Pure wax! Yes, sir. And it could open and shut its eyes, and if you squeezed its stomach it would cry, of course, not like a real baby, but more like one of those ducks that stand on a sort of bellows thing. Though they all “chose” that doll and hoped for miracles, none of them really expected to find it in her stocking sixteen days later. (They kept count of the days.) Maybe Bell Brown might get it; her pa bought her lots of things. She had parlor skates and a parrot, only her ma wouldn't let her skate in the parlor, it tore up the carpet so, and the parrot bit her finger like anything.
The little boys kicked their copper-toed boots to keep warm and quarreled about which one chose the train of cars first, and then began to quarrel over an army of soldiers.
“I choose them!”
“A-aw! You choosed the ingine and the cars.”
“Dung care. I choose everything in this whole window.”