s wife), making an ascension now
and then from the front lawn in a chosen one of her twenty-odd balloons.

[Illustration: "FIELDS THAT LOOK LIKE AN ESKIMO VILLAGE."]

And in winter, should you explore the upper rooms of the house, you
would find all the balloons tucked away snugly in cocoons, as it were,
fast asleep, ranged along the attic floor, each under its net, each
ticketed with a record of its work, marked for good or bad conduct after
it has been tested by master or mistress.

For weeks at a time in the experiment season a captive balloon hovers
above the Frankfort farm, say twelve hundred feet up, and the tricks
they play with that balloon would draw all the boys in the country, if
their parents would let them go. Three guy-ropes hold the balloon steady
like legs of an enormous tripod, and straight down from the netting a
fourth rope hangs free. Now, imagine swinging on a rope twelve hundred
feet long! They do that often for tests of flying-machines or
aeroplanes--swing off the housetop, and sail away in a long, slow curve,
just clearing the ground, and land on top of a windmill at the far side
of the grounds. That's a swing worth talking about! And fancy a man
hitched fast to this rope by shoulder-straps, and as he swings flapping
a pair of great wings made of feathers and silk, and trying to steer
with a ridiculous spreading tail of the same materials. The professor
had a visit from such a man, who had spent years and a fortune in
contriving this flying device, which, alas! would never fly.

[Illustration: "A PAIR OF GREAT WINGS MADE OF FEATHERS AND SILK--WHICH,
ALAS! WOULD NEVER FLY."]

Professor Myers, like most aeronauts, insists that traveling by balloon,
for one who understands it, is no more perilous, but rather less so,
than ordinary travel by rail or trolley or motor carriage. He points out
that for thirty-odd years he and his wife have led a most active
aeronaut existence, have done all things that are done in balloons,
besides some new ones, and got no harm from it--some substantial good
rather, notably an aerial torpedo (operated by electricity from the
ground), which flies swiftly in any desired direction, its silken fans
and aluminum propeller under perfect control from a switchboard; also
the "skycycle" balloon, which lifts the aeronaut in a suspended saddle
and allows him, by the help of sail propeller and flapping aeroplanes
(these driven by hands and feet), to make a gain on the wind, whe