"Father is quite well again! As well as he ever was, in all his life!"
And he said—"Yes, Tommy, thank the Lord, I am. I've been thinking of you all day, my boy. Come, and give me a kiss. Why, how wonderful you look!"
For the joy was more than I could bear; and instead of being able to go to him, I was lifted in a moment, from the surface of the earth, quicker than I ever had gone up before. Now, the faster I go up, the faster I go round,—this seems to be a law of my ascents—yet I do not remember to have felt much fear; and indeed there was little to be afraid of, unless it was a fall into our own chimneystacks. And in my vile stupidity, I even called down—
"Now, father, now will you believe at last?"
Alas, that my very last words to him should have been of low, and unfilial triumph! As I tried to look down at him, through the tree, to show him how comfortable I was up there, I saw him rush out, with his pipe in one hand, from the bower of the drooping branches; and he stood, with his legs wide apart, and his hat off, and threw down his pipe, and rubbed his eyes with both hands, and then lifted them up, and cried—
"The Lord forgive me—that He hath made a son of mine to fly!"
Before he had finished his exclamation, I could see him no more, (because of the way in which I was carried round,) and thus escaped the awful shock of seeing my own dear father fall. And before I could look again in that direction, the briskness of the wind, which was north-west, had taken me so far, that the plane-tree came between, and I could not see the fearful thing that I myself had done.
Yet somehow, or other, my mind misgave me, that I had left some harm behind; and my weight grew greater and greater; as I saw no more of father, who ought to have run up the hill to watch me, as people do to a balloon. This made me come down, at the bottom of our yard, when I might have gone over the Regent's Canal. My flights are always cut short by grief; but no other, by such a grief as this.