all to one side, I levelled my planes and brought her head away from the wind.  In an instant I had shot out of the eddies and was skimming down the sky.  Then, shaken but victorious, I turned her nose up and began once more my steady grind on the upward spiral.  I took a large sweep to avoid the danger-spot of the whirlpool, and soon I was safely above it.  Just after one o’clock I was twenty-one thousand feet above the sea-level.  To my great joy I had topped the gale, and with every hundred feet of ascent the air grew stiller.  On the other hand, it was very cold, and I was conscious of that peculiar nausea which goes with rarefaction of the air.  For the first time I unscrewed the mouth of my oxygen bag and took an occasional whiff of the glorious gas.  I could feel it running like a cordial through my veins, and I was exhilarated almost to the point of drunkenness.  I shouted and sang as I soared upwards into the cold, still outer world.

“It is very clear to me that the insensibility which came upon Glaisher, and in a lesser degree upon Coxwell, when, in 1862, they ascended in a balloon to the height of thirty thousand feet, was due to the extreme speed with which a perpendicular ascent is made.  Doing it at an easy gradient and accustoming oneself to the lessened barometric pressure by slow degrees, there are no such dreadful symptoms.  At the same great height I found that even without my oxygen inhaler I could breathe without undue distress.  It was bitterly cold, however, and my thermometer was at zero, Fahrenheit.  At one-thirty I was nearly seven miles above the surface of the earth, and still ascending steadily.  I found, however, that the rarefied air was giving markedly less support to my planes, and that my angle of ascent had to be considerably lowered in consequence.  It was already clear that even with my light weight and strong engine-power there was a point in front of me where I should be held.  To make matters worse, one of my sparking-plugs was in trouble again and there was intermittent misfiring in the engine.  My heart was heavy with the fear of failure.

“It was about that time that I had a most extraordinary experience.  Something whizzed past me in a trail of smoke and exploded with a loud, hissing sound, sending forth a cloud of steam.  For the instant I could not imagine what had happened.  Then I remembered that the earth is for ever being bombarded by meteor stones, and would be hardly inhabitable were they not in nearly every case turned to vapour in the outer layers of the atmosphere.  Here is a new danger for the high-altitude man, for two others passed me when I was nearing the forty-thousand-foot mark.  I cannot doubt that at the edge of the earth’s envelope the risk would be a very real one.