was to have ascended with him, remain behind,
and quietly substituting a smaller and lighter wicker car, or rather
gallery, took his place within and severed the cords just as the last
gun fired. The Prince of Wales raised his hat, imitated at once by all
the bystanders, and the first balloon that ever quitted English soil
rose into the air amid the extravagant enthusiasm of the multitude. The
intrepid aeronaut, pardonably excited, and fearful lest he should not
be seen within the gallery, made frantic efforts to attract attention
by waving his flag, and worked his oars so vigorously that one of
them broke and fell. A pigeon also gained its freedom and escaped. The
voyager, however, still retained companions in his venture--a dog and a
cat.

Following his own account, Lunardi's first act on finding himself fairly
above the town was to fortify himself with some glasses of wine, and to
devour the leg of a chicken. He describes the city as a vast beehive,
St. Paul's and other churches standing out prominently; the streets
shrunk to lines, and all humanity apparently transfixed and watching
him. A little later he is equally struck with the view of the open
country, and his ecstasy is pardonable in a novice. The verdant pastures
eclipsed the visions of his own lands. The precision of boundaries
impressed him with a sense of law and order, and of good administration
in the country where he was a sojourner.

By this time he found his balloon, which had been only two-thirds full
at starting, to be so distended that he was obliged to untie the mouth
to release the strain. He also found that the condensed moisture round
the neck had frozen. These two statements point to his having reached
a considerable altitude, which is intelligible enough. It is, however,
difficult to believe his further assertion that by the use of his single
oar he succeeded in working himself down to within a few hundred feet of
the earth. The descent of the balloon must, in point of fact, have been
due to a copious outrush of gas at his former altitude. Had his oar
really been effective in working the balloon down it would not have
needed the discharge of ballast presently spoken of to cause it to
reascend. Anyhow, he found himself sufficiently near the earth to land
a passenger who was anxious to get out. His cat had not been comfortable
in the cold upper regions, and now at its urgent appeal was deposited
in a corn field, which was the point of first c