On the next down-stroke it stopped with a jerk, and the baby was
thrown, like a stone out of a catapult, against the washstand,
fortunately with the pillow to break its fall. But the machine kept
whizzing round and round the room as soon as the slat was withdrawn,
and Bradley, in an ecstasy of rage, flung it out the back window into
the yard. It continued to make such a clatter there that he had to go
down and pile up barrels and slop-buckets and bricks and clothes-props
and part of the grape-arbor on it, so that all it could do was to lie
there all night buzzing with a kind of smothered hum and keeping the
next-door neighbors awake, so that they pelted it with bootjacks,
under the impression that it was cats.

Mrs. Bradley expressed such decided views respecting cradles of that
pattern that Mr. Bradley turned his attention to other matters
than those of a domestic character. He resolved to revolutionize
navigation. It occurred to him that some kind of an apparatus might be
devised by which a man could walk upon the surface of the water, and
he went to work at it. The result was that in a few weeks he produced
and patented Bradley's Water Perambulator. It consisted of a couple of
shallow scows, each about four feet long. These were to be fastened to
the feet; and Bradley informed his friends that with a little practice
a man could glide over the bosom of a river with the ease and velocity
with which a good skater skims over the ice.

It looked like a splendid thing. Bradley said that it would certainly
produce a revolution in navigation, and make men wholly independent of
steamers and other vessels when they desired to travel upon water with
rapidity. Bradley intimated that the day would come when a man would
mount a water perambulator and go drifting off to India, sliding over
the bounding billows of the dark blue sea as serenely as if he were