Of course he lost his balance.

His heels flew up, he struck on his back, and like a rocket he darted down the roof feet first, crashed through the dead vines and landed in a sitting posture in fourteen saucers of red-hot candy, in the midst of all that party--and dressed as _he_ was: this lad who could not look a girl in the face with his clothes on.

There was a wild scramble and a storm of shrieks, and Jim fled up the stairs, dripping broken crockery all the way.
[Sidenote: (1867.)] The incident was ended.

But I was not done with it yet, though I supposed I was.

Eighteen or twenty years later I arrived in New York from California, and by that time I had failed in all my other undertakings and had stumbled into literature without intending it.