ded as so great an occasion that
the young Coxwell, who had by this time obtained a commercial opening
abroad, was allowed, at his earnest entreaty, to stay till the event
had come off, and fifty years after the hardened sky sailor is found
describing with a boyish enthusiasm how thirty-six policemen were needed
round that balloon; how enormous weights were attached to the cordage,
only to be lifted feet above the ground; while the police were compelled
to pass their staves through the meshes to prevent the cords cutting
their hands. At this ascent Mr. Hollond was a passenger, and by the
middle of the following November all Europe was ringing with the great
Nassau venture.

Commercial business did not suit the young Coxwell, and at the age
of one-and-twenty we find him trying his hand at the profession of
surgeon-dentist, not, however, with any prospect of its keeping him from
the longing of his soul, which grew stronger and stronger upon him. It
was not till the summer of 1844 that Mr. Hampton, giving an exhibition
from the White Conduit Gardens, Pentonville, offered the young man, then
twenty-five years old, his first ascent.

In after years Coxwell referred to his first sensations in
characteristic language, contrasting them with the experiences of the
mountaineer. "In Alpine travels," he says, "the process is so slow, and
contact with the crust of the earth so palpable, that the traveller
is gradually prepared for each successive phase of view as it presents
itself. But in the balloon survey, cities, villages, and vast tracts for
observation spring almost magically before the eye, and change in
aspect and size so pleasingly that bewilderment first and then unbounded
admiration is sure to follow."

The ice was now fairly broken, and, not suffering professional duties
to be any hindrance, Coxwell began to make a series of ascents under the
leadership of two rival balloonists, Gale and Gypson. One voyage made
with the latter he describes as leading to the most perilous descent in
the annals of aerostation. This was the occasion, given above, on which
Albert Smith was a passenger, and which that talented writer describes
in his own fashion. He does not, however, add the fact, worthy of being
chronicled, that exactly a week after the appalling adventure Gypson
and Coxwell, accompanied by a Captain whose name does not transpire,
and loaded with twice the previous weight of fireworks, made a perfectly
successful night a