While that tall wind was at the top of its sky-scraping energy,
another short cry was heard, beginning very querulous, but ending
very quick, swallowed in abrupt silence. The shiny black cylinder
of Dr. Warner's official hat sailed off his head in the long,
smooth parabola of an airship, and in almost cresting a garden
tree was caught in the topmost branches. Another hat was gone.
Those in that garden felt themselves caught in an unaccustomed eddy
of things happening; no one seemed to know what would blow away next.
Before they could speculate, the cheering and hallooing hat-hunter
was already halfway up the tree, swinging himself from fork to fork
with his strong, bent, grasshopper legs, and still giving forth
his gasping, mysterious comments.

"Tree of life... Ygdrasil... climb for centuries perhaps... owls nesting
in the hat... remotest generations of owls... still usurpers... gone
to heaven... man in the moon wears it... brigand... not yours... belongs
to depressed medical man... in garden... give it up... give it up!"

The tree swung and swept and thrashed to and fro in the thundering
wind like a thistle, and flamed in the full sunshine like a bonfire.
The green, fantastic human figure, vivid against its autumn red and gold,
was already among its highest and craziest branches, which by bare luck did
not break with the weight of his big body. He was up there among the last
tossing leaves and the first twinkling stars of evening, still talking
to himself cheerfully, reasoningly, half apologetically, in little gasps.
He might well be out of breath, for his whole preposterous raid had
gone with one rush; he had bounded the wall once like a football,
swept down the garden like a slide, and shot up the tree like a rocket.
The other three men seemed buried under incident piled on incident--
a wild world where one thing began before another thing left off.