t this glorious, to ride above the clouds, in what seems to us
illimitable space! The earth is only a few miles below us, it is true,
but up and around us space _is_ illimitable.

[Illustration]

But we shall penetrate space no longer in an upward direction. It is
time we were going back to the world. We are all very cold, and the
eyes and ears of some of us are becoming painful. More than that, our
balloon is getting too large. The gas within it is expanding, on
account of the rarity of the air.

We shall pull the rope of the valve.

Now we are descending. We are in the clouds, and before we think much
about it we are out of them. We see the earth beneath us, like a great
circular plain, with the centre a little elevated. Now we see the
rivers; the forests begin to define themselves; we can distinguish
houses, and we know that we are falling very rapidly. It is time to
throw out ballast. We do so, and we descend more slowly.

Now we are not much higher than the tops of the trees. People are
running towards us. Out with another bag of sand! We rise a little.
Now we throw out the anchor. It drags along the ground for some
distance, as the wind carries us over a field, and then it catches in
a fence. And now the people run up and pull us to the ground, and the
most dangerous part of our expedition is over.

[Illustration]

For it is comparatively safe to go up in a balloon, but the descent
is often very hazardous indeed.

On the preceding page is a picture of a balloon which did not come
down so pleasantly as ours.

With nine persons in it, it was driven over the ground by a tremendous
wind; the anchors were broken; the car was bumped against the ground
ever so many times; and the balloon dashed into trees, breaking off
their branches; it came near running into a railroad train; it struck
and carried away part of a telegraph line, and at last became tangled
up in a forest, and stopped. Several of the persons in it had their
limbs broken, and it is a wonder they were not all killed.

The balloon in which we ascended was a very plain, common-sense
affair; but when aerial ascents were first undertaken the balloons
were very fancifully decorated.

For instance, Bagnolet's balloon and that of Le Flesselles, of which
we have given you pictures, are much handsomer than anything we have
at present. But they were not any more serviceable for all their
ornamentation, and they differed from ours in still another way--t