This must have been a very trying moment, both for his patience and my courage, and it is not fair to expect me to remember everything that happened. However, I feel that if I had been caned, there would have been a mark upon my memory; even as boys bear the limits of the parish in their minds, through their physical geography. Likely enough my head was giddy, from so much revolving; and Chumps living near us marched me home, with a big lexicon strapped on my back, to prevent me from trying to fly again.
CHAPTER III. THE DAWN OF SCIENCE.
Most people, and more especially our writers of fiction, history, philosophy, and so forth, indulge in reflection, at those moments, when they are soaring above our heads; but I have always found myself so unlucky in this matter, as in many others, that nothing would ever come into my head, when aloft, to be any good when I came down. Or, at least only once, as will be shown hereafter; and that was the exception, which proves the rule.
Otherwise, I might now give many nice and precise descriptions of "variant motions and emotions, both somatic and psychical"—as Professor Brachipod expressed them—which must, according to his demonstration, have been inside me, at my first flight. Very likely they were; and even if they were not, it would never pay me to be positive—or negative perhaps is the proper word now—because ignorant science is remunerative, and nothing can be got by impugning it.
Yet that consideration, I assure you, has nothing to do with my present silence. I am silent, simply because I know nothing; and if all so placed would try my plan, how much less would be said and written! Nevertheless all biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and the rest of our race who make it their study (after proving it wholly below their heed) these men, if they deign to be called such, have a claim upon me for all my facts; which I will not grudge, when I know them.
From the very outset, they felt this; and my father and mother, who had not slept well, through talking so much of my above adventure—recounted perhaps with some embellishment by Chumps—hardly had got through their breakfast before some eminent "scientists" were at them. For my part, having made a hearty supper, (after long scarcity of butcher's meat,) or perhaps from having swallowed so much air, I had slept long and soundly, and was turning for another good sleep, when I heard great voices.
"Madam, allow me to express surprise," were the words which came up to me, through the ceiling, at the place where my head had made the hole, "extreme surprise at the narrowness of your views. Must I come to the conclusion, that you refuse to forward the interests of science?"
"Sir," replied mother, who was always polite, when she failed to make out what people meant, "science is what I don't know from the moon. But I do know what my Tommy is."