inutes later, when I saw
my balloon had really settled, I cut, too. H-o-o-o, what a sensation!
You know those awful dreams where you fall and fall? Well, it's just
like that for two or three seconds, until your parachute fills wide and
springs you up against the ropes. Then you sail down, down, with a
lovely easy motion until you get close to the ground. But look out for
the landing. Once I struck in a treetop. And you're liable to come down
on houses or anything."

"You're liable to come down in the middle of a lake," put in "Kid"
Benjamin.

"Do you go up?" said I to the "Kid," whose hands and face showed black
smears from painting balloon-cloth. He was certainly not over eighteen.

"Do I?" he answered, with a grin. "I made more'n twenty ascensions and
drops last summer."

"He's the one," said Mrs. Stevens, "who carried that boy up hanging from
the parachute ropes. Don't you remember? At Coney Island? The boy was
helping hold the balloon, and when she started his foot got caught."

"And he went up hanging by his foot?"

The "Kid" nodded. "Yep, stuck fast in the rigging by one shoe. As I sat
on the trapeze bar there was that boy forty feet above me kicking and
yelling. Say, you'd never guess what he was yelling about."

"I suppose he was afraid?"

The "Kid" shook his head. "No, sir; he didn't seem to mind the eight
hundred feet we'd gone up, not a bit. What worried him was sixty cents
in pennies and nickels that had spilled out of his pants pockets while
he was upside down."

Then the "Kid" explained how he postponed his parachute drop on this
occasion and got down safely, boy and all, by letting the balloon cool
off and gradually settle to the ground.

"Isn't a parachute pretty long when it hangs down?" I asked.

"Certainly. It's thirty-five feet from where she hitches on t' the
balloon to where you sit on the bar. That's length o' ropes and length
o' cloth both."

"Then, how can you cut her loose from 'way down on the bar?"

"I'll tell you," put in Mrs. Stevens. "You just pull a tape that hangs
down inside the parachute from a cutaway-block at the parachute head.
The holding-rope passes through that block, and there's a knife-blade in
the block over the rope. The tape pulls the knife-blade down, and away
you go. It's one of my husband's inventions." She was plainly very
proud of her husband.

Presently entered Leo Stevens himself, a surprisingly young man for such
a veteran, scarcely over thirty, the