Li Tee’s stay with Mrs. Martin was brief.  His departure was hastened by an untoward event—­apparently ushered in, as in the case of other great calamities, by a mysterious portent in the sky.  One morning an extraordinary bird of enormous dimensions was seen approaching from the horizon, and eventually began to hover over the devoted town.  Careful scrutiny of this ominous fowl, however, revealed the fact that it was a monstrous Chinese kite, in the shape of a flying dragon.  The spectacle imparted considerable liveliness to the community, which, however, presently changed to some concern and indignation.  It appeared that the kite was secretly constructed by Li Tee in a secluded part of Mrs. Martin’s clearing, but when it was first tried by him he found that through some error of design it required a tail of unusual proportions.  This he hurriedly supplied by the first means he found—­Mrs. Martin’s clothes-line, with part of the weekly wash depending from it.  This fact was not at first noticed by the ordinary sightseer, although the tail seemed peculiar—­yet, perhaps, not more peculiar than a dragon’s tail ought to be.  But when the actual theft was discovered and reported through the town, a vivacious interest was created, and spy-glasses were used to identify the various articles of apparel still hanging on that ravished clothes-line.  These garments, in the course of their slow disengagement from the clothes-pins through the gyrations of the kite, impartially distributed themselves over the town—­one of Mrs. Martin’s stockings falling upon the veranda of the Polka Saloon, and the other being afterwards discovered on the belfry of the First Methodist Church—­to the scandal of the congregation.  It would have been well if the result of Li Tee’s invention had ended here.  Alas! the kite-flyer and his accomplice, “Injin Jim,” were tracked by means of the kite’s tell-tale cord to a lonely part of the marsh and rudely dispossessed of their charge by Deacon Hornblower and a constable.  Unfortunately, the captors overlooked the fact that the kite-flyers had taken the precaution of making a “half-turn” of the stout cord around a log to ease the tremendous pull of the kite—­whose power the captors had not reckoned upon—­and the Deacon incautiously substituted his own body for the log.  A singular spectacle is said to have then presented itself to the on-lookers.  The Deacon was seen to be running wildly by leaps and bounds over the marsh after the kite, closely followed by the constable in equally wild efforts to restrain him by tugging at the end of the line.  The extraordinary race continued to the town until the constable fell, losing his hold of the line.  This seemed to impart a singular specific levity to the Deacon, who, to the astonishment of everybody, incontinently sailed up into a tree!  When he was succored and cut down from the demoniac kite, he was found to have sustained a dislocation of the shoulder, and the constable was severely shaken.  By that one infelicitous stroke