n seen at night from a balloon at a distance as
resembling a vast conflagration. When actually over the town, a main
thoroughfare like the Commercial Road shone up like a line of brilliant
fire; but, travelling westward, Oxford Street presented an appearance
which puzzled him. "Here the two thickly studded rows of brilliant
lights were seen on either side of the street, with a narrow, dark space
between, and this dark space was bounded, as it were, on both sides by
a bright fringe like frosted silver." Presently he discovered that this
rich effect was caused by the bright illumination of the shop lights on
the pavements.

London, as seen from a balloon on a clear moonlight night in August
a year ago (1901), wore a somewhat altered appearance. There were the
fairy lamps tracing out the streets, which, though dark centred, wore
their silver lining; but in irregular patches a whiter light from
electric arc lamps broadened and brightened and shone out like some
pyrotechnic display above the black housetops. Through the vast town
ran a blank, black channel, the river, winding on into distance, crossed
here and there by bridges showing as bright bands, and with bright
spots occasionally to mark where lay the river craft. But what was most
striking was the silence. Though the noise of London traffic as heard
from a balloon has diminished of late years owing to the better paving,
yet in day hours the roar of the streets is heard up to a great height
as a hard, harsh, grinding din. But at night, after the last 'bus has
ceased to ply, and before the market carts begin lumbering in, the
balloonist, as he sails over the town, might imagine that he was
traversing a City of the Dead.

It is at such times that a shout through a speaking trumpet has a most
startling effect, and more particularly a blast on a horn. In this case
after an interval of some seconds a wild note will be flung back from
the house-tops below, answered and re-answered on all sides as it echoes
from roof to roof--a wild, weird uproar that awakes suddenly, and then
dies out slowly far away.

Experiments with echoes from a balloon have proved instructive. If, when
riding at a height, say, of 2,000 feet, a charge of gun-cotton be fired
electrically 100 feet below the car, the report, though really as loud
as a cannon, sounds no more than a mere pistol shot, possibly partly
owing to the greater rarity of the air, but chiefly because the sound,
having no background