'Can you feel them stretching you?' asked Mr Twit.
'I can! I can!' cried Mrs Twit. 'They're stretching me like mad.'
He put on another ten balloons. The upward pull became very strong.
Mrs Twit was quite helpless now. With her feet
tied to the ground and her arms pulled upwards by the balloons, she was unable to move. She was a prisoner, and Mr Twit had intended to go away and leave her like that for a couple of days and nights to teach her a lesson. In fact, he was just about to leave when Mrs Twit opened her big mouth and said something silly.
'Are you sure my feet are tied properly to the ground?' she gasped. 'If those strings around my ankles break, it'll be goodbye for me!'
And that's what gave Mr Twit his second nasty idea.
Mrs Twit Goes Ballooning Up
'There's enough pull here to take me to the moon!' Mrs Twit cried out.
'To take you to the moon!' exclaimed Mr Twit. 'What a ghastly thought! We wouldn't want anything like that to happen, oh dear me no!'
'We most certainly wouldn't!' cried Mrs Twit. 'Put some more string around my ankles quickly! I want to feel absolutely safe!'
'Very well, my angel,' said Mr Twit, and with a
ghoulish grin on his lips he knelt down at her feet. He took a knife from his pocket and with one quick slash he cut through the strings holding Mrs Twit's ankles to the iron ring.
She went up like a rocket.
'Help!' she screamed. 'Save me!'
But there was no saving her now. In a few seconds she was high up in the blue sky and climbing fast.
Mr Twit stood below looking up. ' What a pretty sight!' he said to himself. 'How lovely all those balloons look in the sky! And what a marvellous bit of luck for me! At last the old hag is lost and gone for ever.'
Mrs Twit Comes Ballooning Down
Mrs Twit may have been ugly and she may have been beastly, but she was not stupid.
High up there in the sky, she had a bright idea. 'If I can get rid of some of these balloons,' she said to herself, 'I will stop going up and start to come down.'
She began biting through the strings that held the balloons to her wrists and arms and neck and hair. Each time she bit through a string and let the balloon float away, the upward pull got less and her rate of climb slowed down.
When she had bitten through twenty strings, she stopped going up altogether. She stayed still in the air.
She bit through one more string.
Very, very slowly, she began to float downwards.
It was a calm day. There was no wind at all. And because of this, Mrs Twit had gone absolutely straight up. She now began to come absolutely straight down.
As she floated gently down, Mrs Twit's petticoat billowed out like a parachute, showing her long knickers. It was a grand sight on a glorious day, and thousands of birds came flying in from miles around to stare at this extraordinary old woman in the sky.
Mr Twit Gets a Horrid Shock
Mr Twit, who thought he had seen his ugly wife for the last time, was sitting in the garden celebrating with a mug of beer.
Silently, Mrs Twit came floating down. When she was about the height of the house above Mr Twit, she suddenly called out at the top of her voice, 'Here I come, you grizzly old grunion! You rotten old turnip! You filthy old frumpet!'
Mr Twit jumped as though he'd been stung by a giant wasp. He dropped his beer. He looked up. He gaped. He gasped. He gurgled. A few choking sounds came out of his mouth. 'Ughhhhhhhh!' he said. 'Arghhhhhhhh! Ouchhhhhhhh!'