ower of hats and
caps. Did their mothers know? Probably not, or there might have been
screaming of a less joyous kind. One diminutive but intrepid youth of
six won for himself the proud distinction of "our old experienced
aeronaut," being generally used as ballast in making up a load.

[Illustration: DONALDSON AND THE CHILDREN.]

Donaldson's fondness for proving his nerve in the face of a doubting
crowd led him into many difficulties, as it finally caused his death.
Once, when about to make an ascension at Pittsburg with a balloon that
had not been used since the previous season, his assistant, Harry
Gilbert, noticed that the ropes attaching the netting to the
concentrating-ring seemed rotten, and proposed to replace them with new.
This Donaldson insisted would take too much time, but he was finally
induced to allow eight of the sixteen to be renewed. While giving his
customary trapeze performance high above the housetops the old cords
began to snap, and before he could bring the balloon down every one of
them had parted--a startling intimation of how his rashness might have
resulted.

Among the unkilled American aeronauts undoubtedly the best known for
professional skill and experience is Samuel A. King. He seems to have
been a predestined air-sailor, for he made his first ascension
(Philadelphia, 1851) in his twenty-third year, and during more than two
hundred subsequent voyages, many of them extending over hundreds of
miles, and some adding darkness and proximity to large bodies of water
to the ordinary dangers, he has shown an intuitive knowledge of the
construction and management of the balloon and an appreciation of aerial
forces which, while they have not robbed his experiences of thrilling
incidents, have kept them singularly free from disastrous consequences.
One of the most memorable of these excursions was made from Plymouth,
New Hampshire, September 26, 1872, on which occasion Mr. King was
accompanied by his friend and frequent fellow-voyager, Luther L. Holden,
of the _Boston Journal_. The balloon used only held twenty thousand
cubic feet of gas, but was inflated with hydrogen. It was liberated at
4.18 P.M., and immediately manifested a determination to accompany some
dense black clouds which were hurrying in a north-easterly direction
toward the heart of the mountain-region on the verge of which Plymouth
lies. Over Mount Washington and across the Androscoggin Valley it flew
at the rate of fifty miles an