valve-cord by accident
sharing the same fate, leaving an opening about seventeen feet in
diameter. Then, "the crowd having given us room, father asked me whether
I felt timid about going. I told him I was determined to go if the
balloon would take me. He said, 'Good-bye, Johnny:' I said, 'Good-bye,'
and found myself shooting up into space on a cold, rainy October day,
coatless, without ropes, anchor or valve-cord, the rags of the balloon
fluttering in the breeze created by the sudden ascent; the multitude
vociferously cheering me one moment and the next calling me to come back
for God's sake! But I only replied by hurrahing and waving my hat,
feeling perfectly _cool_, and rather enjoying the excitement of the vast
crowd that was now fast disappearing below me. In seven minutes the
earth vanished from my sight, and I passed from a driving rain below the
clouds into a dense snowstorm above them. My feet and hands were almost
numb with cold, and the prospect was about as cheerless as it well could
be, when a thought passed through my brain that made me laugh outright.
I had heard of people coming down in bursted balloons, but I was the
first who had ever gone up in one. The idea appeared so ridiculous that
it really made me feel warmer." Think of this aerial babe in the woods,
with Nature's awful forces warring about him and the earth lost to view,
laughing himself warm over a joke at the expense of his terrible
situation! Truly, "he jests at scars that never felt a wound." Perhaps
it was the balloon, but I believe it could only have been his good
angel, that brought the boy safely down into a small cleared space in a
forest thirty-eight minutes and forty miles from the point of departure.

[Illustration: WASHINGTON H. DONALDSON.]

Another of Master John's voyages curiously illustrates the different
directions of coexistent currents. On July 4, 1878, he made an
ascension from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, landing ten miles south of the
city, while J.M. Johnston, of the _Lancaster Intelligencer_, who
ascended in another balloon at the same moment, came down at a point
equally distant in an exactly opposite direction from the city.

With the name of John Wise that of another aeronaut equally well known
is associated--not alone by their joint attempt to cross the Atlantic by
balloon, but also on account of the probably identical manner and
locality of the death of both--Washington H. Donaldson. While the
interest in the mysteri