rest of you. I know better now. The fact is,
we do not go up at all; but at about five
minutes past six on the evening of Friday, the
14th of September, 1838—at about that time,
Vauxhall Gardens, with all the people in
them, went down!" What follows is excellent.
"I cannot have been deceived," says he; "I
speak from the evidence of my senses, founded
upon repetition of the fact. Upon each of the
three or four experimental trials of the powers
of the balloon to enable the people to glide
away from us with safety to themselves—down
they all went about thirty feet!—then, up
they came again, and so on. There we sat
quietly all the while, in our wicker buckbasket,
utterly unconscious of motion; till, at
length, Mr. Green snapping a little iron, and
thus letting loose the rope by which the earth
was suspended to us—like Atropos, cutting the
connexion between us with a pair of shears
—down it went, with everything on it; and
your poor, paltry, little Dutch toy of a town,
(your Great Metropolis, as you insolently call
it), having been placed on casters for the
occasion- I am satisfied of that- was gently
rolled away from under us."*
*"Crotchets in the Air, or an Un-scientific Account of a
Balloon Trip," By John Poole, Esq. colburn, 1838.

Feeling nothing of the ascending motion,
the first impression that takes possession of
you in "going up" in a balloon, is the quietude
- the silence, that grows more and more
entire. The restless heaving to and fro of the
huge inflated sphere above your head (to say
nothing of the noise of the crowd), the
flapping of ropes, the rustling of silk, and the
creaking of the basket-work of the car—all
has ceased. There is a total cessation of all
atmospheric resistance. You sit in a silence
which becomes more perfect every second.
After the bustle of many moving objects, you
stare before you into blank air. We make no
observations on other sensations—to wit, the
very natural one of a certain increased pulse,
at being so high up, with a chance of coming
down so suddenly, if any little matter went
wrong. As all this will differ with different
individuals, according to their nervous systems
and imaginations, we will leave each person
to his own impressions.

So much for what you first feel; and now
what is the first thing you do? In this case
everybody is alike. We all do the same thing.
We look over the side of the car. We do
this very cautiously—keeping a firm seat, as
though we clung to our seat by a certain attraction
of cohesion—and then, holding on by
the edge, we carefully protrude the peak of
our travelling-cap, and then the tip of the
nose, over the edge of the car, upon which we
rest our mouth. Everything below is seen
in so new a form, so flat, compressed, and
simultaneously—so much too-much-at-a-time
—that the first look is hardly so satisfactory
as could be desired. But soon we thrust the
chin fairly over the edge, and take a good
stare downwards; and this repays us much
better. Objects appear under very novel
circumstances from this vertical position, and
ascending retreat from them, (though it is
they that appear to sink and retreat from us.)
They are stunted and foreshortened, and
rapidly flattened to a map-like appearance;
they get smaller and smaller, and clearer and
clearer. "An idea," says Monck Mason, "involuntarily
seizes upon the mind, that the
earth with all its inhabitants had, by some
unaccountable effort of nature, been suddenly
precipitated from its hold, and was in the act
of slipping away from beneath the aëronaut's
feet into the murky recesses of some unfathomable
abyss below. Everything, in fact, but
himself, seems to have been suddenly endowed
with motion." Away goes the earth, with
all its objects—sinking lower and lower, and
everything becoming less and less, but getting
more and more distinct and defined as they
diminish in size. But, besides the retreat
towards minuteness, the phantasmagoria
flattens as it lessens—men and women are of
five inches high, then of four, three, two, one
inch—and now a speck; the Great Western is
a narrow strip of parchment, and upon it you
see a number of little trunks "running away
with each other," while the Great Metropolis
itself is a board set out with toys; its
public edifices turned into "baby-houses, and
pepper-castors, and extinguishers, and chessmen,
with here and there a dish-cover—
things which are called domes, and spires,
and steeples!" As for the Father of Rivers,
he becomes a dusky-grey, winding streamlet,
and his largest ships are no more than flat
pale decks, all the masts and rigging being
foreshortened to nothing. We soon come
now to the shadowy, the indistinct,—and
then all is lost in air. Floating clouds
fill up all the space beneath. Lovely colours
outspread themselves, ever-varying in tone,
and in their forms or outlines—now sweeping
in broad lines,—now rolling and heaving
in huge, richly, yet softly-tinted billows—
while sometimes, through a great opening,
rift or break, you see a level expanse of
grey or blue fields at an indefinite depth
below. And all this time there is a noiseless
cataract of snowy cloud-rocks falling around
you—falling swiftly on all sides of the car, in
great fleecy masses—in small snow-white and
glistening fragments—and immense compound
masses—all white, and soft, and swiftly
rushing past you, giddily, and incessantly
down, down, and all with the silence of a
dream—strange, lustrous, majestic, incomprehensible!

Aëronauts, of late years, have become, in
many instances, respectable and business-like,
and not given to extravagant fictions about
their voyages, which now, more generally, take
the form of a not very lively log. But it used
to be very different when the art was in its
infancy, some thirty or forty years ago, and
young balloonists indulged in romantic fancies.
We do not believe that there was a direct