were whistling a shrill
salute that, toned down by the distance, was really not unmusical.

Having crossed the Hudson and swept above Weehawken, we found ourselves
cruising northwest over the marshes of the Hackensack.

As the heat of the declining sun lessened, our cooling gas contracted
and the balloon sank steadily until at 5.10 we were 250 feet above the
earth and 100 feet of our great drag rope was trailing on the ground.
Within hailing distance of people beneath us, a curious condition was
observed. We could hear distinctly all they said, though we could not
make them understand a word; our voices had to fill a sphere of air;
theirs, with the earth beneath them, only a hemisphere. Thus the
modern megaphone is especially useful to aeronauts.

Hereabouts our fun began. Many countrymen thought the balloon running
away with us and tried to stop and save us--always by grasping the drag
rope, bracing themselves, and trying literally to hold us; when the
slack of the rope straightened, they performed somersaults such as our
pilot vowed no acrobat could equal. And yet the balance of the balloon
is so fine that even a child of ten can pull one down, if only it has
strength enough to withstand occasional momentary lifts off the ground.
Occasionally one more clever would run and take a quick turn of the
rope about a gate or fence--and then spend the rest of the evening
gathering the scattered fragments and repairing the damage.

And when there was not fun enough below, Donaldson himself would take a
hand and put his steed through some of her fancy paces--as when,
approaching a large lake, he told us to hold tightly to the stays, let
out gas and dropped us, bang! upon the lake. Running at a speed of
twelve or fifteen miles an hour, we hit the water with a tremendous
shock, bounded thirty or forty feet into the air, descended again and
literally skipped in great leaps along the surface of the water,
precisely like a well-thrown "skipping stone." Then out went ballast
and up and on we went, no worse for the fun beyond a pretty thorough
wetting!

At 6.20 p.m. we landed on the farm of Garrett Harper in Bergen County,
twenty-six miles from New York. After drinking our fill of milk at the
farmhouse, we rose again and drifted north over Ramapo until, at 7.30,
a dead calm came upon us and we made another descent. We then found
that we had landed near Bladentown on the farm of Miss Charlotte
Thompson, a charming actress o