naught of the disagreeable sensation
one experiences in a rapidly rising elevator. Instead it rather seemed
that we were standing motionless, stationary in space, and that the
earth itself had gotten loose and was dropping away beneath us to
depths unknown. Every cord and rope of the huge fabric was tensely
taut, the basket firm and solid beneath our feet. Indeed, the balloon,
with nothing more substantial in her construction than cloth and twine,
and hempen ropes and willow wands (the latter forming the basket), has
always, while floating in mid-air free of the drag rope's tricks, the
rigid homogeneity of a rock, a solidity that quickly inspires the most
timid with perfect confidence in her security.

Ballast was thrown out by Donaldson,--a little. At Seventh Avenue and
Forty-second Street our altitude was 2,000 feet. The great city lay
beneath us like an unrolled scroll. White and dusty, the streets
looked like innumerable strips of Morse telegraph paper--the people the
dots, the vehicles the dashes. Central Park, with its winding waters,
was transformed into a superb mantle of dark green velvet splashed with
silver, worthy of a royal _fete_. Behind us lay the sea, a vast field
of glittering silver. Before us lay a wide expanse of Jersey's hills
and dales that from our height appeared a plain, with many a
reddish-gray splash upon its verdant stretches that indicated a village
or a town.

Above and about us lay an immeasurable space of which we were the only
tenants, and over which we began to feel a grand sense of dominion that
wrapped us as in royal ermine: if we were not lords of this aerial
manor, pray, then, who were? Beneath us, lay--home. Should we ever
see it again? This thought I am sure came to all of us. I know it
came to me. But the perfect steadiness of the balloon won our
confidence, and we soon gave ourselves up to the gratification of our
enviable position; and enviable indeed it was. For who has not envied
the eagle his power to skim the tree-tops, to hover above Niagara, to
circle mountain peaks, to poise himself aloft and survey creation, or
to mount into the zenith and gaze at the sun?

Indeed our sense of confidence became such that, while sitting on the
edge of the basket to reach and pass Donaldson a rope he asked for, I
leaned so far over that the bottle of brandy resting in my hip pocket
slipped out and fell into the Hudson.

Oddly, Ford, who was the most experienced ballooni