with the wounded. We thought we’d chance it, and
we did. We swooped down and stopped, and Jim
shinned down the ladder and fetched up the kid, which
was a nice fat little thing, and in a noble good humor,
too, considering it was just out of a battle and been
tumbled off of a horse; and then we started for the
mother, and stopped back of her and tolerable near
by, and Jim slipped down and crept up easy, and when
he was close back of her the child goo-goo’d, the way
a child does, and she heard it, and whirled and fetched
a shriek of joy, and made a jump for the kid and
snatched it and hugged it, and dropped it and hugged
Jim, and then snatched off a gold chain and hung it
around Jim’s neck, and hugged him again, and jerked
up the child again, a-sobbing and glorifying all the
time; and Jim he shoved for the ladder and up it, and
in a minute we was back up in the sky and the woman
was staring up, with the back of her head between her
shoulders and the child with its arms locked around
her neck. And there she stood, as long as we was in
sight a-sailing away in the sky.
CHAPTER VII.
TOM RESPECTS THE FLEA
“NOON!” says Tom, and so it was. His shadder
was just a blot around his feet. We looked,
and the Grinnage clock was so close to twelve the
difference didn’t amount to nothing. So Tom said
London was right north of us or right south of us, one
or t’other, and he reckoned by the weather and the
sand and the camels it was north; and a good many
miles north, too; as many as from New York to the
city of Mexico, he guessed.
Jim said he reckoned a balloon was a good deal the
fastest thing in the world, unless it might be some
kinds of birds — a wild pigeon, maybe, or a railroad.
But Tom said he had read about railroads in England
going nearly a hundred miles an hour for a little ways,
and there never was a bird in the world that could do
that — except one, and that was a flea.
“A flea? Why, Mars Tom, in de fust place he
ain’t a bird, strickly speakin’ –”
“He ain’t a bird, eh? Well, then, what is he?”
“I don’t rightly know, Mars Tom, but I speck he’s
only jist a’ animal. No, I reckon dat won’t do, nuther,
he ain’t big enough for a’ animal. He mus’ be a bug.
Yassir, dat’s what he is, he’s a bug.”
“I bet he ain’t, but let it go. What’s your second
place?”
“Well, in de second place, birds is creturs dat goes
a long ways, but a flea don’t.”
“He don’t, don’t he? Come, now, what IS a long
distance, if you know?”
“Why, it’s miles, and lots of ’em — anybody knows
dat.”
“Can’t a man walk miles?”
“Yassir, he kin.”
“As many as a railroad?”
“Yassir, if you give him time.”
“Can’t a flea?”
“Well — I s’pose so — ef you gives him heaps of
time.”
“Now you begin to see, don’t you, that DISTANCE
ain’t the thing to judge by, at all; it’s the time it takes
to go the distance IN that COUNTS, ain’t it?”
“Well, hit do look sorter so, but I wouldn’t ‘a’
b’lieved it, Mars Tom.”
“It’s a matter of PROPORTION, that’s what it is; and
when you come to gauge a thing’s speed by its size,
where’s your bird and your man and your railroad,
alongside of a flea? The fastest man can’t run more
than about ten miles in an hour — not much over ten
thousand times his own length. But all the books says
any common ordinary third-class flea can jump a hun-
dred and fifty times his own length; yes, and he can
make five jumps a second too — seven hundred and
fifty times his own length, in one little second — for he
don’t fool away any time stopping and starting — he
does them both at the same time; you’ll see, if you