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From the ong ago fallen down into the dle of the lake er water, and on tow...d the a great bowl, [[/cut off]] . . . and its rim seemed to be on a level with the eye. The little hills and valleys of the landscape were not discernible. To the north the peak of Mount Wachusett showed like a slight elevation and beyond it Mount Monadnock looked like an ear on the edge of the bowl. Mount Tom, over to the west, by the Connecticut river, could be seen, and to the east, some forty miles distant, Bunker Hill Monument and the big chimney in the Charleston Navy yard, being almost in line, showed as one narrow chimney. The balloon was moving eastward at about the rate of a mile in two minutes; yet there was no sensation of motion. The great bowl beneath seemed to be passing slowly toward the west. "My ears sing," said one of the men in the basket. "We're falling," said Donaldson from his perch above the ring, "Work your jaws and your ears will stop ringing. You can see that we are descending by looking at the shadow of the balloon on the ground. It grows larger." The balloon was allowed to descend until it was in the valley of a little river that flows toward the east. There is always a wind current one way or the other in a valley and with the current setting easterly the balloon sailed along, part of the time with some of the 250 foot drag rope trailing. It arose the track of the Boston and Albany Railroad half a dozen times or more where the road changed from one to the other side of the river. Conversation with persons along the highways and in the dooryards was easy --easy for them, for we could make out what they said in ordinary tones, but hard for us in one way, for we had to shout to make them hear. "Where'd you come from?" some one would shout at the top of his voice. "From Worcester!" would be the answer, using the hands as a megaphone. Then we would hear the inquirer say in his ordinary voice: "They say they come from Worcester." Offers of hospitality came to us all along Usually the inducement to descend was pie and milk. A few hospitable souls invited us to come down and have "something," and we shook our heads regretfully. There were a few incidents of the trip that I mentioned as "moving incidents" when I began talking. These were strung along at various stages of the journey. It was supper time when we saw the village of Ashland ahead, and we decided to descend. The drag rope was trailing about fifty feet on the ground. Donaldson shouted to those below to catch hold of the rope. One man succeeded in getting a grip on it and found himself going so fast that he was afraid to let go. He came to a stone wall, hit the top of it with one foot and landed in a small pond. He hung on and made a wake like that of a swimming muskrat till he reached the other bank. There he got help, the balloon's speed was checked and the airship was pulled to the earth, towed to a stone fence and weighted with cobblestones. A man promised to keep persons with matches away, and we went to a hotel to supper. After, supper the wind had fallen, and the ascent of the balloon was almost straight up. At the height of about half a mile Donaldson said: "Want to smoke?" The passengers grinned. Donaldson wound the open and flapping neck of the gas bag around his arm, held it there for a minute and then said: "Now you can light up." "What!" exclaimed the passengers. "Light up," said Donaldson. Cigars were nibbled at the end and matches poised for striking, but nobody scratched. "Go ahead," said the aeronaut. There was a flash of matches, and soon the men in the basket were enjoying their smokes. "There is always a thin stream of gas trailing out of the neck of the balloon," Donaldson explained. "We can smell it a little all the time. When I wind the neck around my arm most of the leakage is shut off and we soon pass out of the cloud of gas left behind. 'Illuminating gas, or a mixture of it with air, will not ignite from a coal. But if any man's cigar goes out let me know before you strike a match. Better not try to get a light from another cigar. It might make a spark hot enough to touch off the gas and air mixture where the gas comes out." Thus assured, the passengers crooked their elbows around the supporting lines of the basket and leaned their backs against its rim, as a man leans upon the rail of a steamship at sea, and puffed away in comfort. Two of them threw their legs over the edge of the basket and, with one arm twined around a rope, smoked meditatively and spat down between their feet to the ground half a mile below. In the increasing coolness of the afternoon the balloon soon descended to within less than 200 feet of the earth. Suddenly the basket was brought up with a short jerk and the big gas bag swayed over in the direction in which we were going. "Drop your cigars!" said Donaldson. the drag rope had turned itself around a tall brick chimney on the ell of a large farmhouse. There was a bit of a struggle and the chimney was toppled over through the glass roof of a conservatory. The family had not seen the balloon and they came tumbling out of the house in terror. "So sorry!" shouted Dave Thomas, with a gesture of anguish. "Please send the bill to Barnum's Hippodrome at Providence next week." A little further along, while passing over a cemetery, the drag rope picked up a gravestone and deposited it in the dooryard of a residence a few rods away. Beyond this point the balloon crossed the river and took a cross-country course. The heavy drag rope of a balloon sings various songs, according to what it is passing over. We were coming to a farmhouse and the rope was whistling softly as it ran through a meadow. the farmer was walking from the barn to the house with a pail of milk, He heard something, set down his pail and held his hand to his ear. Just then the drag rope came to a stone wall and hummed like a planning mill. The farmer seemed to be getting excited. Then the rope struck the ridgepole of the barn and roared and creaked like a gigantic horse fiddle. The farmer cast his eyes up, saw the heavy rope zipping over his head, followed it with his eyes up to the basket and started for the house, yelling: "Balloon! Balloon!" It was not long before the balloon was again running low down along the Boston and Albany railroad. Perhaps fifty feet of the drag rope was on the round. A freight train bound east came around a curve. There were brakemen on top of some of the cars, but none of the crew saw us. We were afraid the drag rope would brush some brakeman off. We shouted as loud as we could, but the train made so much noise that no one on it heard us. As the balloon drifted diagonally across the track the drag rope grazed the sides of the cars. Then it swung in between two of them. There it caught fast, drew taut and began to haul the balloon along with the train. The men on the train had not seen the balloon or the rope. The passengers in the balloon were deeply interested in what was going on down below. Suddenly one of them remarked in a whisper to the others: "See that stone arch ahead?" Less than half a mile away a highway crossed the railroad on a heavy arch of masonry. The men in the balloon basket held their breaths. The train roared along towing the balloon. Very nicely for all concerned, the drag rope suddenly let go its hold on the train and the balloon righted and resumed its course. The men in the basket looked up at Donaldson. He was kneeling on his wire net perch, and holding the two inch drag rope between the jaws of what looked like a pair of stout hedge shears. :It's all right now," he said. "What would you have done if the rope hadn't come loose?" he was asked. "Cut the rope and pulled the rip line." he said. "Why pull the rip line?" "Because throwing out so much ballast as the weight of the drag rope would make the balloon shoot up until she would be in danger of exploding--considering her patched condition. "Pulling the rip rope would have split the gas bag from the valve in the top down to the neck; the balloon would have collapsed and the canvas floated up into the netting, making a sort of parachute. "most likely we all would have got down with our lives, and maybe without any broken bones." Over the town of Natick night was coming on. The balloon was running low and it was difficult to see what was ahead. "A bag of sand, Mr. Thomas," said Donaldson. While Thomas was emptying a bag of sand Donaldson shouted: "Two bags, quick!" Two of the passengers grabbed a bag each and without waiting to pour out the sand let them go. Nobody was hit by either bag, but both went through the wooden sidewalk where they struck. The balloon nicely cleared a tall chimney that seemed to belong to a shoe factory, and lightened by the loss of seventy-five pounds of sand went up and up. The lights of Natick drew closer and closer together until it seemed from the balloon that they could be covered with a man's hat. It was too dark for Donaldson to read his aneroid, but he [[cut off]] as nearly as he could make it out the [[cut off]] was between a mile and a half and a mile and three-quarters. When the lights of Boston came very plainly into view the genius of Mr. David S. Thomas as a press agent began to bloom anew. "We want," he said, "to land in Boston--preferably on Boston Common." "We haven't ballast enough to go that far," said Donaldson. "We will all take off our overcoats and shoes if necessary, ticket them and drop them overboard when we have to." "But she's bearing too far to the southeast now," said one of the passengers who knew the lay of the land and the water. "We'll go out over the harbor." By that time the airship was nearing the big city, but her course was too much toward the water. Donaldson said that if he threw out ballast and went higher up he might find a wind current setting in from the harbor that would enable us to reach the city. So he dropped a bag or two. The balloon arose steadily for a few seconds. Then the great bag leaned over toward the north, the basket spun around like a dying peg top and we were off with a stiff wind that would bear us far to the north of the city. "That settles it,' said Donaldson: "it's about 9 o'clock and we might as well be looking for a landing place." By the time the balloon had settled down to the right height for letting go the anchor we were well up country and beyond help in getting down. We had the usual rough shaking up while the anchor was getting a good ground hold, and when we had pulled ourselves down by hauling in on the anchor line until the basket touched something, we seemed to be in a clump of bushes. "I'll step out and--" began one of the passengers. "Please don't," Donaldson interrupted. "My greatest worry always is that somebody will step out when we get down to within ninety or a hundred feet of the ground." As we found out afterward, we were then in the tops of some great elm tree, seventy or eighty feet tall, in the township of Weston, a dozen miles or so to the northwest of Boston. -----------