‘What is it I must do?’ cried Mrs Twit, clutching her cheeks.
‘You’ve got to be stretched,’ said Mr Twit.
Mrs Twit Gets a Stretching
Mr Twit led Mrs Twit outdoors where he had everything ready for the great stretching.
He had one hundred balloons and lots of string.
He had a gas cylinder for filling the balloons.
He had fixed an iron ring into the ground.
‘Stand here,’ he said, pointing to the iron ring. He then tied Mrs Twit’s ankles to the iron ring.
When that was done, he began filling the balloons with gas. Each balloon was on a long string and when it was filled with gas it pulled on its string, trying to go up and up. Mr Twit tied the ends of the strings to the top half of Mrs Twit’s body. Some he tied round her neck, some under her arms, some to her wrists and some even to her hair.
Soon there were fifty coloured balloons floating in the air above Mrs Twit’s head.
‘Can you feel them stretching you?’ asked Mr Twit.
‘I can! I can!’ cried Mrs Twit. ‘They’re stretching me like mad.’
He put on another ten balloons. The upward pull became very strong.
Mrs Twit was quite helpless now. With her feet tied to the ground and her arms pulled upwards by the balloons, she was unable to move. She was a prisoner, and Mr Twit had intended to go away and leave her like that for a couple of days and nights to teach her a lesson. In fact, he was just about to leave when Mrs Twit opened her big mouth and said something silly.
‘Are you sure my feet are tied properly to the ground?’ she gasped. ‘If those strings around my ankles break, it’ll be goodbye for me!’
And that’s what gave Mr Twit his second nasty idea.
Mrs Twit Goes Ballooning Up
‘There’s enough pull here to take me to the moon!’ Mrs Twit cried out.
‘To take you to the moon!’ exclaimed Mr Twit. ‘What a ghastly thought! We wouldn’t want anything like that to happen, oh dear me no!’
‘We most certainly wouldn’t!’ cried Mrs Twit. ‘Put some more string around my ankles quickly! I want to feel absolutely safe!’
‘Very well, my angel,’ said Mr Twit, and with a ghoulish grin on his lips he knelt down at her feet. He took a knife from his pocket and with one quick slash he cut through the strings holding Mrs Twit’s ankles to the iron ring.
She went up like a rocket.
‘Help!’ she screamed. ‘Save me!’
But there was no saving her now. In a few seconds she was high up in the blue sky and climbing fast.
Mr Twit stood below looking up. ‘What a pretty sight!’ he said to himself. ‘How lovely all those balloons look in the sky! And what a marvellous bit of luck for me! At last the old hag is lost and gone for ever.’
Mrs Twit Comes Ballooning Down
Mrs Twit may have been ugly and she may have been beastly, but she was not stupid.
High up there in the sky, she had a bright idea. ‘If I can get rid of some of these balloons,’ she said to herself, ‘I will stop going up and start to come down.’
She began biting through the strings that held the balloons to her wrists and arms and neck and hair. Each time she bit through a string and let the balloon float away, the upward pull got less and her rate of climb slowed down.
When she had bitten through twenty strings, she stopped going up altogether. She stayed still in the air.
She bit through one more string.
Very, very slowly, she began to float downwards.
It was a calm day. There was no wind at all. And because of this, Mrs Twit had gone absolutely straight up. She now began to come absolutely straight down.
As she floated gently down, Mrs Twit’s petticoat billowed out like a parachute, showing her long knickers. It was a grand sight on a glorious day, and thousands of birds came flying in from miles around to stare at this extraordinary old woman in the sky.