and had it made up into a dress for herself— of
course at his expense.

In short, a few minutes' conversation with
this terrible old lady, who lived a good fifty
years before the grand "Deluge" came,
furnishes overwhelming testimony to that
tremendous convulsion. If there were this utter
rottenness in the green, what must it have been in
the dry, after a momentum of so many years?

BALLOON MAD.

On the twenty-fourth of July, just five-and-
twenty years ago, I saw my simple-hearted old
friend, by his own will, drop from the clouds.
He was cut from the tail of a balloon, sitting in
a parachute of his own invention; the parachute
at once broke into ruin; and with a sick heart I
turned my eyes from the sight of that thing like
a dull drunken day-meteor tumbling swiftly and
unsteadily to earth with a friend's life at the
heart of it thus visibly coming to its end.

If he had but dropped only an hour sooner
from the clouds of that strange craze by which
he was possessed! It is not easy to distinguish
madness from enthusiasm, and I had but a
youth's instinct of reason and unreason. It may
not be the more true because I never doubted, and
I don't doubt now, that my poor little friend and
drawing-master, Mr. Cocking, was balloon mad.

He was indeed one of the simplest, kindliest,
and happiest of little men. For a couple of
years before his death and up to the very time
of it, I had been one of two pupils and friends
closeted with him in a small room, the sanctum
of his house, for an hour or two on two evenings
of the week, with drawing-paper, pencils, and
Indian-rubber, subject to the direction of his
patient skill. His affectionate simplicity of
character attached him to the young.

On winter evenings he would sit with us,
short, round, and pleasantly untidy, unbending
a face that could, on occasion, meet the welcome
pinch of snuff with an aspect highly sedate and
important, over the frame on which he had
mounted paper for a large and highly-finished
sepia drawing of a balloon. He had many such
drawings of one man's and another man's
balloon; all the balloons beautifully large and brown
and softly rounded, with their gores well
indicated, their ropes faultless, and their cars
minutely finished. Costly illustrated folios on
aërostation lay, one on the top of another, on a
book-stand, within reach of his little table. My
impression was that there was, for library,
everything that had been printed in French or
English on the subject of ballooning, and nothing
else. What Mr. Cocking meant to do with the
contents of his own portfolio of balloon-
drawings, I did not, as I saw its contents multiply,
at all understand. After his death they were
sold, and whoever possesses them now possesses
true labours of love. For, certain it is that he
drew balloons because he loved them, and
delicately stroked with the sepia over their fat
sides, as a lover strokes the curls of his mistress.

Contemplation of balloons might even have
rounded his own person. At any rate he was
not fat through over much prosperity. With
patient drudgery his right hand held the house
over his head, and he was able to support in
modest comfort, not only his wife, but also two
aged relatives whose claim on him was that they
would have no helper were that hand of his
withheld. What patient smiling drudgery it
was! To his rare delicacy of pencilling he
might have joined inventive power as an artist,
and stood high in the profession by which he
must live. But all his best energy went up
in air-bubble, and his castles in the air were
balloons. As it was, though he was not
unknown as a clever landscape-painter, I suspect
that he found the perfumers better patrons than
the public. With a quiet unresentful patience,
when he might not indulge in stroking at his
dear balloons, he would slowly produce,
designing as he drew, a delicately finished flower-
border for the label of somebody's "Infallible
Milk of Rosy Dawn for Improving the
Complexion and removing Freckles."
Communicative as a child, he never expressed either
impatience at such work or pleasure in it.

He never showed us— and I believe never
troubled himself to keep in the house— any of
the engravings made from such designs,
beautiful as they often really were. Yet he kept in
his desk and in his drawers, all manner of small
curiosities, suggesting greater thoughts not
personal to himself. He had the youth's crude
taste for collecting curiosities, and as I also had
such treasures, he was free to give. I am sure
that he hadn't more than five grains' weight of
Sand from the Great Desert of Africa, and yet he
gave me two of them. Poor dear old Cocking!
The three grains he kept were all the hint of any
sort of desert to be found at his fireside.

While we drew, he talked, and in his talk
there never was a note of discontent, an
unkind word of any one. To be sure, he talked
almost entirely of balloons, and how could he be
anything but happy when upon that theme?
He had a profound regard for anybody who had
climbed the sky. His mortal enemy, could he
have had one, would have come down to him
again, to be entertained as an angel after one
mount heavenward in Mr. Green's balloon. As
for the excellent Mr. Green himself, who was
then already the hero of several hundred
ascents, he can hardly have suspected how
devoutly his old friend Cocking loved him. Once
there was great joy in the house, for Mr. Green
was coming to tea. We two youths (whom our
kind little teacher could not so often see without
taking us to his heart as friends) were invited
to meet the great man. I remember the solemn
delight of our friend's anticipation, and how his
very soul went out in welcome to his guest. If
all the Sovereigns in Europe had been coming to
drink tea with him in force, he would without
motion have taken in for them an extra cottage-
loaf and half-pound of fresh butter. He would
have endeavoured also, as a polite host, not to
talk balloons while they sat round his table, if he
found them unwilling to enter into such high