collars and choke to death; drops them on
sharp railings, which spear them through; drops them--but the
professor's list (backed by statistics, be it said) is too long and
gruesome. It is only fair to add that I have a friend, Leo Stevens, a
professional aeronaut, who has made thousands of drops from hot-air
balloons and claims that nothing is safer than a parachute, and says he
can steer one in its downward sailing so as to avoid dangerous
landing-places, although he does admit numerous hair-breadth escapes, as
when he dropped from a parachute two miles out at sea, this at Long
Branch in 1898, and was only saved by his life-preserver and the courage
of some fishermen, or again when De Ive, his partner in ballooning
ventures, dropped with him on one occasion from a big balloon (one
parachute was suspended on either side), and landed in Lake Canandaigua
and was drowned. "Oh, there's no doubt a man takes chances on a
parachute," said Stevens, "but I like it."

There is a singular thing about parachutes, Stevens contends, not
sufficiently considered by Professor Myers in his experiments. The
professor, with his usual thoroughness, has tested all shapes and kinds
of parachutes by dropping them from a captive balloon with a sand-bag
hitched on instead of a man. The dropping was done by a fuse which would
burn the supporting rope and at a given moment set the parachute free,
just as a man under the parachute would cut it free. And in a large
number of cases the parachute did not open in time to save the sand-bag
man from destruction on the ground.

"That proves," argues the professor, "that parachutes are extremely
dangerous."

"Nothing of the sort," answers Leo Stevens; "it only proves that there
is a big difference between a sand-bag man and a real man. The sand-bag
is dead weight, and the man is live weight. A parachute will open for
the one where it won't open for the other."

"Why will it," queries the professor, "if the man and the sand-bag weigh
the same?"

[Illustration: "STEVENS CAME DOWN ONCE WITH A PARACHUTE TWO MILES OUT IN
THE ATLANTIC OCEAN--AND WAS PROMPTLY RESCUED."]

"I don't know why, but it will," Stevens insists. "If what you say
were true I'd be dead long ago, and my wife, and all my assistants."

I well remember my first visit to aeronaut Stevens at his little balloon
establishment on Third Avenue, a rambling, go-as-you-please attic, with
things strewn about anyhow, lengths of balloon-cloth hangi