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Updated: September 27, 2025
"No not exactly," replied Caspar, in a drawling tone, and smiling significantly as he spoke; "but if they be kites Ho! what now?" exclaimed the speaker, his train of thought, as well as speech, suddenly interrupted by a movement on the part of the falcons. "What the mischief are the birds about? As I live, they seem to be making an attack upon Fritz!
This juvenile world of Japan ludicrous by birth, and fated to become more so as the years roll on starts in life with singular amusements, with strange cries and shouts; its playthings are somewhat ghastly, and would frighten the children of other countries; even the kites have great squinting eyes and vampire shapes.
The crowd was uncommonly large because Saturday and the first of August came on the same day. They crowded three in a seat and ate sandwiches and drank cold coffee out of milk bottles and let the children fly paper-bag kites out of the windows, and crowded six deep at the water cooler at the end of the car.
But, still, for the next few days, at first proceeding close-hauled on the starboard tack and then, as the wind veered more round to the west, running free before it, with all our flying kites and stu'n'sails set, the time passed as pleasantly as before; and we had about just as little to do in the way of seamanship aboard, the ship almost steering herself and hardly a tack or a sheet needing to be touched.
"And what is thy opinion, Trysail? the ship is doing well, and she carries her canvas bravely." "The ship behaves like a well-bred young woman in the presence of the Queen; modest, but stately but, of what use is canvas, in a chase where witchcraft breeds squalls, and shortens sail in one vessel, while it gives flying kites to another!
There were hills in the back ground, which might probably shelter vultures, kites, and the family of quadrupeds that feed upon offal, and much did I desire to mount a high trotting camel, and take a scamper amongst these hills obliged to content myself with jogging soberly on with my party, I was fain to find amusement in the contemplation of a cavalcade, the like of which will probably not be often seen again.
China was there, which to me was a place where they did nothing but fly kites; so much I remembered from my geography book; there too was Boston, merely a place where we sold our huckleberries in summer. I had been as far as Mendon and found that the world did not end there, nor were there any hills even. They had moved themselves to the next horizon whitherto my fancies had flown.
And yet it ain't a balloon, because it's coming against the wind, and it's nothing of the æroplane sort neither, because it hasn't planes or kites or any fixings of that kind. Still it's made of something like metal and glass, and it must take a lot of keeping up. It's travelling at a pretty healthy speed too. Getting on for a hundred miles an hour, I should guess. Ah! he's going to speak us!
The Boyce party with its two balloons and its great number of box kites and its moving picture equipment and its twenty-nine cameras and its vast equipment was slow in starting, but it expected to get away on September twenty-fourth, the day after we left.
Some of them had paper fringe pasted round the edges of their kites; this made a fine rattling as the kite rose, and when the kite stood, at the end of its string, you could hear the humming if you put your ear to the twine. But the most fun was sending up messengers.
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