enabled us to rise, descend, move in horizontal or oblique lines, as we pleased, and as often as we thought necessary, without actually landing."

They finally landed in safety, and with ease. They had ascended, as we have read, to the height of 11,732 feet. All this had been accomplished in a year after Montgolfier's great invention. It seemed that man's triumph over the atmosphere was to be brief and easy. Never-perhaps not when Columbus brought America to light-was any discovery wafted to such a height on the breath of popular applause. Benjamin Franklin, then at the French Court, being interrogated on the possibilities of the balloon, had answered simply, "C'est l'enfant qui vient de naître."

It was a non-committal sort of reply; and a century has shown the wisdom of it. More than a hundred years has passed; and has ballooning made any great strides since 1783? We may perhaps find an answer in the account of an ascent made in 1875, and with that we will conclude our chapter.

On March 2nd, 1874, the French Society of Aerial Navigation resolved to organise an ascent with the balloon Étoile du Nord, for the purpose of testing the restorative powers of oxygen breathed in place of ordinary air in a rarefied atmosphere. The expedition was a failure. The aëronauts attained to no great altitude, and yet, according to their report, experienced severe derangement of the system, a derangement which the oxygen hardly succeeded in alleviating.

The Society determined to try again. "There are certain extremely systematic minds," says M. de Fonvielle, in commenting upon the experiment, "that have an unhappy tendency to believe that in physiological experiments we may substitute for natural conditions certain artificial preparations or operations made upon the subjects. It was in obedience to this disastrous idea that the future aëronauts of the Zenith submitted to experiments made under a pneumatic bell, for the purpose of accustoming themselves to this in rarefied air. The "bell ascent" having given satisfactory results, it was believed that no obstacle could arrest the intrepid men who set out to repeat it in infinite space."

At any rate, in the April of 1875, a new balloon, the Zenith, set out from the La Villette gas-works, in Paris. It was a bright spring day. The sky was cloudless; in the loftier regions of the air a cold dry current blew from the Pole. The car contained three persons, M. Sivel, M. Crocé-Spinalli, and M. Gaston Tissandier. The last-mentioned had come for the express purpose of carrying out a particular experiment. His purpose was to analyse the dust

of the air; and to this end he had brought an aspirator containing a large reservoir of petroleum oil. The apparatus was heavy, but to prevent accidents it was fastened to the car by cords which could be easily cut. The bags of ballast also were so arranged outside the car that by a stroke of the knife they could be at once emptied.

The ascent was gradual. An E.N.E. wind was blowing, and the sky was blue but

vaporous. The rate of ascent was calculated at nine feet per second, but slowly lessened. By one o'clock, or soon after, the three aëronauts were at an altitude of 22,800 feet. They were weak and languid, but felt otherwise well. The inhalation of the oxygen produced good effects.

A consultation was held, and it was desired to mount higher, the Zenith being in equilibrium. A quantity of ballast was thrown overboard. Up soared the balloon; and at this point M. Tissandier fainted.

At eighteen minutes past two he was awakened by M. Crocé-Spinalli, who begged him to heave over ballast as the balloon was rapidly descending.

He obeyed in a mechanical sort of way. At the same time M. Crocé-Spinalli threw overboard the aspirator, which weighed eighty pounds. M. Tissandier then scribbled a few disconnected words in his note-book and, while doing so, dropped off into a state of stupor for about half an hour. When he awoke, the balloon was descending at a terrific rate. All the ballast was exhausted.

He looked in terror to his two friends for help. Their faces were black. They were dead-suffocated. Blood was flowing from their mouths and noses.

It was a terrible situation. Down hurled the balloon. Tissandier's sole resource was to cut the grapnel rope an instant before the car struck the ground. He did so with amazing coolness. The force of the wind had increased. Tissandier tore open the balloon to stop it. It was caught on a hedge, at Ciron, a commune of Indre, 190 miles S.S.W. of Paris. M. Tissandier escaped serious injury; the others were dead of course. The survivor was picked up by a family of the neighbourhood and treated with every kindness.

N 1855 there appeared in the Gotland Journal the following minute and harrowing account of one of the many perilous journeys undertaken by the Gotland mail-carriers in the performance of their duties. The island of Gotland, from which the heroes of this story set out, lies almost in the middle of the Baltic. Oeland, to which they carried the post, lies to the south-west of Gotland, separated from the Swedish mainland only by a narrow strait.

The mails are still carried over Oeland during the winter, as the sea to the north of Gotland is invariably frozen over, so that it is impossible to carry them directly to Stockholm, as is done during the summer.

To those who have never attempted to propel a boat through floating masses of ice, it seems almost incredible that the heroes of this tale should have lain for a whole day actually within sight of their houses, yet wholly unable to make their way to them, and without those on the shore being able to convey to them any help. But the difficulties of such a passage are enormous. Rowing is out of the question; and if an attempt be made to propel the boat by means of boat-hooks, or poles, as soon as one has the end of the pole fast on the ice, and gives a push, the ice goes under, without. the boat being helped on its way.

If the boat be sufficiently near the land, help can be sometimes conveyed in the following way:-A few brave men set out from the shore on the hard frozen ice with a small flat-bottomed boat, which is subsequently propelled over the floating ice, with the help of boards laid out on either side of the boat. These both serve to support the boat and to give a firm foothold to the men who laboriously push it along. When they get near enough to the belated boat they cast out to it a rope. which they have brought with them, the other end of it being made fast to the shore. Horses are then attached to the shore end of the cable, and the boat is gradually drawn to land. During the winters in Gotland this method has frequently to be put into practice.

Our story, which might be called "A Scene from a Gotland Winter, sketched from Nature," runs as follows:

On the 14th of January, 1830, the ordinary mail-boat left Klinte, a port in Gotland, directly opposite the northern end of Oeland, with a crew consisting of three men-Anders Wallin, Jonas Hasselquist, and Nicholas Mårbeck. The passage was swift and uneventful; the mails were landed in Oeland on the same day.

A week later another post started from Klinte in an ordinary fishing-boat, the crew of which consisted of three men, Peter Wahlgren, Jonas Carlson, and Peter Magnus Fagerstrom. When they got as far as Karlsö, a small island a little distant from the coast of Gotland, they saw that the sea beyond it was covered with ice. They were unwilling to abandon the voyage, but as they needed at least four men to drag the boat over the ice, they returned to Klinte to get the necessary addition to their crew. They found the man they needed in Kari Löfquist, a young man of twenty years, the eldest of six children of a poor widow, whose chief support he was. Giving less thought to the danger of the voyage than to his mother's needs, he eagerly accepted their offer. So ill-equipped was he for the journey that he had to borrow a pair of seaman's boots from Wahlgren and a jersey from Fagerstrom.

On the following day they set out again from Klinte, and worked their way through a band of ice and floes to Karlsö. Beyond that the sea was fairly free from ice, and the wind being favourable, they arrived on the same afternoon within a short distance of Euggjersudden, in Oeland, where they stuck fast in the floating ice. But as they were no great distance from land, the crew of the mail-boat, which had arrived a week earlier, came out with some of the inhabitants of the coast to their assistance, and after considerable trouble managed to get a rope out to the boat, and drag it safely to land.

The next day the ice closed up around Oeland, so that there was no open water in sight. But a south-westerly wind arising again dispersed it, and the crews of the two boats, in the hope of getting open water, at least as far as Karlsö, agreed to return together, and to take with them a passenger, one

Wilhelm Måg, a journeyman saddler from Berlin, who had passed some time in Sweden, and spoke the language fluently.

On the 26th of January they started on their return journey from Euggjersudden. The larger boat was placed on sledges and dragged over the hard frozen ice, which bordered the coast, by horses; the smaller boat was pushed along by its crew. But soon after the start the ice broke under the foremost horses, which were promptly rescued, and sent back with the sledges to Oerland. The boats were pushed on to the edge of the ice and launched; but as the wind went down, and the ice began to look threatening, they returned again to land. At four o'clock on the morning of January 27th, they made a fresh start. The smaller boat, although with its sail set, was tied by a tow-rope to the larger one, which went at a faster rate. With a favourable wind they steered their course for Karlsö, which they hoped to reach by evening. Everything seemed to promise for the best, and they talked of taking their morning glass in their homes.

Owing to their stay of some days in Oeland, their provisions had run rather short, and in the hope of a swift and favourable voyage home, they had not cared to obtain any on credit. They had with them, by this time, barely enough for two days, and their provision of spirits was exceptionally small.

The boat sped on its way amid the joyous converse of the two crews; but towards the afternoon, Wallin, who was steering the large boat, called his comrades aft, and pointed out to them three lights, which seemed to be shining in the water beneath the rope which joined the two boats. Although intercourse with the wonders of the deep usually begets superstition, yet our travellers attached no great importance to this curious appearance. As will be seen, they discovered its meaning only too well later on.

In the evening they began to experience the unpleasant feeling of moving through floating ice. They hoped that it would not come to much, and that they would soon regain the open water but their hopes were utterly frustrated, and about eight o'clock the boat stuck fast in the floes. The wind changed from south-west to south-east, and a dark winter's night, with gloomy clouds and whistling wind, closed upon the day which had been so full of bright hopes. All night long they toiled and strove to make their way through the floating ice and get nearer to land, or at any rate, hold their course. But their toil was all in vain.

Day rose on the 28th of January only to show the sea covered with ice as far as the eye could reach. All hope of reaching Karlsö was gone, for the ice was driving northward and bore the boat along with it. Yet the faster the boat was driven along the higher their spirits rose, for they saw a chance of working their way to the promontory of Vestergarn, which lies north of Karlsö. Clambering on to the blocks of ice which surrounded them, they tried to work the boat in the direction which they wished; and the drops of sweat which trickled from their brows, in spite of the cold, bore witness to the intensity of