n's very self in face and figure!
He had the same bright, piercing eye, that looked straight into mine;
the same lean, square jaws and resolute mouth; the same waving hair,
the same low, cool, steady voice--such a resemblance as to dull my
senses, and make me wonder and grope to understand how my friend could
thus come back to me, still young after so many years.

It was Donaldson's son, a babe in arms at the time his father sailed
away to his death!

In a few simple words he told me that he and his family lived in a
small village. With infinite grief they had read the article charging
his father with unmanly conduct--a grief that was the greater because
they possessed no means to refute the charge. Brokenly, with tears of
gratitude, he told of their joy in reading my statements in his
father's defence, and how he had been impelled to come and try in
person to express to me the gratitude he felt he could not write.

Poor though this man may be in this world's goods, in the record of his
father's character and deeds he owns a legacy fit to give him place
among the Peers of Real Manhood.

Through some mischance I have lost the address of Donaldson's son.
Should he happen to read these lines I hope he will communicate with me.

CHAPTER VI

AN AERIAL BIVOUAC

In the history of contests since man first began striving against his
fellows, seldom has a record performance stood so long unbroken as that
of the good airship _Barnum_, made thirty-three years ago. Of her
captain and crew of five men, six all told, the writer remains the sole
survivor, the only one who may live to see that record broken in this
country.

The _Barnum_ rose at 4 p.m. July 26, 1874, from New York and made her
last landing nine miles north of Saratoga at 6.07 p.m. of the
twenty-seventh, thus finishing a voyage of a total elapsed time of
twenty-six hours and seven minutes. In the interim she made four
landings, the first of no more than ten minutes; the second, twenty;
the third, ten; the fourth, thirty-five; and these descents cost an
expenditure of gas and ballast which shortened her endurance capacity
by at least two or three hours.

Tracing on a map her actual route traversed, gives a total distance of
something over four hundred miles, which gave her the record of second
place in the history of long-distance ballooning in this country, a
record which she still holds.

So far as my knowledge of the art goes, and I have tried to