perilous, this last section—the gingerly mounting of a ladder of chair rungs and legs uneasily poised upon a cushioned seat—was as hazardous as ever human experiment had been. The frail structure creaked and trembled beneath him, as, with infinite caution and testing, he swung one long leg after the other up the frail scaffolding. An unworthy eagerness made his heart beat when he was within the last rung of the top chair seat. The glass of the skylight was all but within his reach … he could almost touch it with his outstretched hand as he tried the last step.
But already ominously the wooden child of his fancy, the engine he had made, was beginning to betray him. He felt an uneasy swinging in the tower of chairs. He tried to compensate it by too sudden a movement of his body, and then—crash!—and in the tenth of a second all was ruin.
He felt his head striking a rung of wood, a cushion, an iron bar, his hands clutching at a chaotic and cascading ruin of furniture, and he completed his adventure sitting hard upon the floor with the legs of the wooden chairs about him, the stuffed arm-chair upside down within a foot of his head, the iron bedstead hanging at a dangerous slant above the end
