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But we shall penetrate space no longer in an upward direction.  It is time we were going back to the world.  We are all very cold, and the eyes and ears of some of us are becoming painful.  More than that, our balloon is getting too large.  The gas within it is expanding, on account of the rarity of the air.

We shall pull the rope of the valve.

Now we are descending.  We are in the clouds, and before we think much about it we are out of them.  We see the earth beneath us, like a great circular plain, with the centre a little elevated.  Now we see the rivers; the forests begin to define themselves; we can distinguish houses, and we know that we are falling very rapidly.  It is time to throw out ballast.  We do so, and we descend more slowly.

Now we are not much higher than the tops of the trees.  People are running towards us.  Out with another bag of sand!  We rise a little.  Now we throw out the anchor.  It drags along the ground for some distance, as the wind carries us over a field, and then it catches in a fence.  And now the people run up and pull us to the ground, and the most dangerous part of our expedition is over.

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For it is comparatively safe to go up in a balloon, but the descent is often very hazardous indeed.

On the preceding page is a picture of a balloon which did not come down so pleasantly as ours.

With nine persons in it, it was driven over the ground by a tremendous wind; the anchors were broken; the car was bumped against the ground ever so many times; and the balloon dashed into trees, breaking off their branches; it came near running into a railroad train; it struck and carried away part of a telegraph line, and at last became tangled up in a forest, and stopped.  Several of the persons in it had their limbs broken, and it is a wonder they were not all killed.

The balloon in which we ascended was a very plain, common-sense affair; but when aerial ascents were first undertaken the balloons were very fancifully decorated.

For instance, Bagnolet’s balloon and that of Le Flesselles, of which we have given you pictures, are much handsomer than anything we have at present.  But they were not any more serviceable for all their ornamentation, and they differed from ours in still another way—­they were “hot-air balloons.”

Other balloons were furnished with all sorts of fans, rudders, etc., for the purpose of steering them, or accelerating their motion up or down.

On the next page is one of that kind.

This balloon ascended from Dijon, France, in 1784, but the steering-apparatus did not prove to be of much use.

There were other balloons devised by the early aeronauts, which were still stranger than that one which arose from Dijon.  The Minerva, the picture of which you can examine at your leisure, was invented by a Mr. Robertson, in the beginning of this century.  He wished to make a grand aerial voyage of several months, with a company of about sixty persons, and therefore he had to have a very large balloon.  To procure this he desired the co-operation of the scientific men throughout Europe, and sent plans and descriptions of his projected balloon to all the learned societies.