st of the party after
Donaldson himself, seemed most nervous and timid, but it was naught but
an expression of that constitutional trouble (dizziness) so many have
when looking down from even the minor height of a step-ladder. In all
the long hours he was with us, I do not recall his once standing erect
in the basket, and when others of us perched upon the basket's edge, he
would beg us to come down. But mind, there was no lack of stark
courage in Alfred Ford, sufficiently proved by the fact that he never
missed a chance for an ascent.

But safe? Confident? Why, before we were up ten minutes, Lyons and
MacKeever were sitting on the edge of the basket, with one hand holding
to a stay, tossing out handfuls of small tissue paper circulars bearing
"News from the Clouds." Many-colored, these little circulars as they
fell beneath us looked like a flight of giant butter-flies, and we kept
on throwing out handfuls of them until our pilot warned us we were
wasting so much weight we should soon be out of easy view of the earth!
Indeed, the balance of the balloon is so extremely fine that when a
single handful of these little tissue circulars was thrown out,
increased ascent was shown on the dial of our aneroid barometer!

At 4.30 p.m. we had drifted out over the Hudson at an altitude of 2,500
feet. Here Donaldson descended from the airy perch which he had been
occupying since our start on the concentrating ring, when one of us
asked how long he expected the cruise to last. He replied that he
hoped to be able to sail the _Barnum_ at least three or four days.

"But," he added, "I shall certainly be unable, to carry all of you for
so long a journey, and shall be compelled to drop you one by one. So
you had best draw lots to settle whom I shall drop first, and in what
order the rest shall follow."

Sailing then 2,500 feet above the earth, Lyons voiced a thought racing
from my own brain for utterance when he blurted out: "What the deuce do
you mean by 'drop' us?" Indeed, the question must have been on three
other tongues as well, for Donaldson's reply, "Oh, descend to the earth
and let you step out then," was greeted by all five of us with a salvo
of deep, lusty sighs of relief.

Then we drew lots for the order of our going, MacKeever drawing first,
Austin second, Lyons third, Ford fourth, and I fifth.

Meantime, beneath us on the river vessels which from our height looked
like the toy craft on the lake in Central Park