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"I said I should have to plead guilty. "One," he answered, "is a pie-skylight and the other is a sky-pilot."

I knocked him down and strode away haughtily. 
But the use of the term "sky-pilot" is becoming more frequent every day. Formerly it referred to a parson, a saver of souls; but in this sense it is rapidly becoming obolete. I have never, to be sure, been nearer a balloon trip than a sky-scraper roof to watch the fireworks; but then, most people have never been on the roof of a two-story cottage.

A sky-pilot is a man who pilots a balloon or air-ship. Some folks have an idea that to go up in a balloon all you have to do is to get in the basket and yell to the man to let go the rope, when the balloon bounds gladly upward; this is an error.

It seems to the spectators to bound gladly upward, but to the balloonist the earth falls away suddenly with a dull, thudless motion. To themselves, the aeronauts seem to be quiescent. The birdlike sphere is in the clouds and the sky-pilot heaves over some sand and a long-drawn sigh.

Again the balloon bounds up etherward with the silent motion of a swallow. It is said that the poise of a balloon in midair is so delicate that it could be moved up or down with the weight of the little finger, provided one hand had a little finger long enough to reach it; but in that case it wouldn't ba a little finger any longer; that is, a long finger any--but you see what I mean.

Now, the monster bag, freed of its weight, bounds aloft. If it is pleasant that day, the sunshine strikes it, expanding the gas, sometimes to twice its volume; thus, a man starting out with only $7 worth of gas suddenly finds he has $14 worth. This is the only method ever discovered of getting the best of a gas company.

The balloon shoots to heights empyreal. Now the sky-pilot, if he is "on his job," must recover that sand; this he does by steering into the first sand storm he meets and taking a tipcart load aboard.

In fact, aerocraft are steered entirely by sand, and this brings us to the main topic.

Sand is indispensable to ballooning or airshippery. If you want to go up, you throw out some sand, and if you want to go faster, you shake a corn-popper full of sand out over the unsuspecting public. A balloon without sand is like a warship without coal.

Years ago, it is said, the Standard Oil Company found itself so burdened with a by-product called gasolene that it was forced to load it into tank steamers, tow them out to sea and spill the fluid upon the bosom of the briny deep. Then came the automobile craze, and now a poor man cannot afford gasolene on his table, but must content himself with the cheaper grades of imitation olive oil, made from cottonseed and pressed peanuts. This promises to be the case if Congress does not take prompt action and defend our sand lots. 

If the new sport grows apace, no man's sand will be safe from irresponsible balloonists, who will descend when out of snd, shovel a back yard into a basket and, like Arabs in the night, silently steal away. Our beaches will be shovelled up by midnight marauders, carted off in aluminum ships and scattered to the four points of the compass, and a pedestrian will have to dodge sand that wants to get in his eyes livelier than a Pittsburger now dodges soot. 

What, I ask, is to become of our Maine Beaches and those at Newport? What of Atlantic City and the sppedway at Palm Beach, Fla.? Yea, all Florida itself, for the whole state is a sand-bar. And the sand dunes of St. Joe, Mich., which now greet the homebound mariner from Chicago on his four-hour steam across the lake?

All to be taken aboard balloons, a bushel at a time, perhaps, and dumped promiscuously upon the inland landscape wherever the caprie of the kiteist decides. Will this now throw the earth out of balance in time?

Land sharks will buy up all the sand dunes from Watch Hill, R.I., to the old Kearney lots of San Francisco and put a fancy price on sand, and then we shall have a sand trust. Sandpaper will advance to so tremendous a price that we shall no longer be able to afford it to scratch matches upon, but will be forced to resort to the old primitive method devised by Father Adam.

Sand will be too high-priced to use in mortar, and sandbaggers will be forced out of business unless they become able to devise some other silent means of paralyzing the inoffensive citizen. It will be too dear to spread on slippery sidewalks in winter, and locomotives will have to slide along on greasy tracks, for the sand-box will have been relegated to the junk heap.

Sand peas, sand flies and clams will have no place to build their nests, and must become extinct. We shall not have enough sand wherewith to sand a barroom floor, and sandwiches will be eaen only by the rich and affluent. Foreign balloonists will buy their sand on this side of the water and shake it out over the other, thus increasing the size of Europe and diminishing that of our own land, and our legislators will find themselves sore pressed to keep the United States together even by the annexation process.

Fellow-citizens! Be warned in time! Now we have plenty of sand for everybody; but unless proper legislation is at once secured, our sand is threatened with a deadly peril. Already the whirr of strange things is heard upon the air, portents of a sandless time acoming.  

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Transcription Notes:
image: outline of the state of Massachusetts with balloon overhead.