It resembles, you see, a closed umbrella without a handle, and it has cords at the bottom, to which a car is attached.  If we wish to come down by means of this contrivance, we must descend from the car of the balloon to that of the parachute, and then we must unfasten the rope which attaches us to the balloon.  We shall then drop like a shot; but as soon as the air gets under our parachute it will spread open, and our descent will immediately begin to be much more gradual, and if nothing unusual occurs to us, we shall come gently to the ground.  This picture shows the manner in which we would come down in a parachute.

[Illustration]

This man’s balloon has probably burst, for we see it is tumbling down, and it will no doubt reach the ground before him.

When all is ready and we are properly seated in the car, with our instruments and extra clothes and ballast, and some provisions, we will give the word to “let her go.”

There!

Did you see that?

The earth dropped right down.  And it is dropping, but more slowly, yet.

That is the sensation persons generally experience when they first go up in a balloon.  Not being used to rising in the air, they think at first that they are stationary, and that the earth and all the people and houses on it are falling below them.

Now, then, we are off!  Look down and see how everything gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller.  As we pass over a river, we can look down to its very bottom; and if we were not so high we could see the fishes swimming about.  The houses soon begin to look like toy-cottages, and the trees like bushes, and the creeks and rivers like silvery bands.  The people now appear as black spots; we can just see some of them moving about; but if they were to shout very loud we might hear them, for sound travels upward to a great distance.

[Illustration:  Moonlight above the clouds.]

Soon everything begins to be mixed up below us.  We can hardly tell the woods from the fields; all seem pretty much alike.  And now we think it is getting foggy; we can see nothing at all beneath us, and when we look up and around us we can see nothing but fog.

[Illustration]

We are in the clouds!  Yes, these are the clouds.  There is nothing very beautiful about them—­they are only masses of vapor.  But how thick that vapor is!  Now, when we look up, we cannot even see the balloon above us.  We are sitting in our little basket-work car, and that is all we know!  We are shut out from the whole world, closed up in a cloud!

But this foggy atmosphere is becoming thinner, and we soon shoot out of it!  Now we can see clearly around us.  Where are the clouds?  Look! there they are, spread out like a great bed below us.

How they glisten and sparkle in the bright sunlight!

Is not this glorious, to ride above the clouds, in what seems to us illimitable space!  The earth is only a few miles below us, it is true, but up and around us space is illimitable.