and he had
grown accustomed to dangers of the air and diamonds of value in his
apparel.

"Isn't it queer," said Stevens, talking it over, "how a fellow will stay
away from his people when everything is all right, and get back to them
through trouble? After I started in to be a balloonist I never saw my
mother for seven years. Then I came once more to Cleveland to give an
exhibition at the very park where I first went up--they call it Forest
City Park. I was to perform on a slack wire nine hundred feet long,
stretched between two towers one hundred and fifty feet high. My wire
wasn't long enough to reach all the way, so they spliced on a length of
three hundred feet more, and before I began my feats I walked back and
forth over the wire to test it. I always do that. Then I walked to the
middle of the wire and pretended to slip and fall--that's a regular
trick to startle the crowd. You let yourself drop suddenly, catch on the
wire, and spring up again. Well, this time when I let myself drop I
didn't spring up again, and I didn't know anything more for nineteen
days, when I came to myself in the Huron Street Hospital. Somehow that
splice in the wire had broken, and I went straight to the ground,
breaking one arm, both wrists, and cracking my spinal column in four
places. It's a wonder I lived at all, they say, and during that hard
time my mother came to me, as mothers do. Oh, she doesn't love the
balloon business, I can tell you. But I love it. I've made over a
thousand ascensions, and never been badly hurt but once."

[Illustration]

We were far away now from our balloon-making, and I reminded Stevens
that we had still to tell the boys how to make a parachute.

"All right," said he; "here you are," and he gave me the following
directions: "The parachute is made of fourteen segments of tissue paper,
each one like this, measuring thirty-six inches long, six inches wide at
the base, and tapering like the pattern up to a point. These segments
must be pasted together lengthwise, the fourteen points joining at the
top of the parachute, and in each one of the fourteen side-seams a
length of eighty inches of No. 8 thread must be pasted, leaving two
inches sticking out at the top and about four feet hanging down below.
The short ends at the top must be tied together, and these made fast to
a piece of iron hoop pasted in the mouth of the balloon. Here the fuse
must be placed and lighted just as the balloon is ready to start. A