At any rate they all came safely back, after having been up about fourteen hundred feet and sailing about two miles from where they went up. People began to go wild over ballooning, and in a few months a young Frenchman, Pilatre des Roziers, made a balloon and said he would go up himself in it. He had it securely fastened by eighty feet ropes, for men were not yet ready to cut loose from the earth, and he made several ascents. He kept the air heated

A Parachute closed.

by a fire built upon a grating of wire in the car. At length he ventured to try a journey without the ropes, so he got into the car with a companion, kindled his fires, and away they went half a mile up and floated about a mile and a half away. That was a great feat, and he kept on; but one day when he was up in the air with a Mr. Romane the fire caught the balloon and it was burned."

"But they don't make balloons go by fire now, do they?" asked Lucy.

"No, people learned to fill balloons with hydrogen gas, and they became more and more adventurous. Only three years after balloons were invented two men

sailed across the English Channel. The great trouble now seems to be to steer the balloon so as to make it independent of the currents of wind."

"I never understood how a parachute worked," said Nathan. "I know it is something like an umbrella."

"An umbrella is the nearest and simplest account of it. When

the balloon is in motion the parachute, I believe, is like a shut-up umbrella, with a car attached. If you were to jump off the house with an enormous umbrella held aloft, not caught at the spring, the air, I suppose, would force the folds up and open the umbrella wide, when you would begin to descend more slowly. It is something thus with a parachute. When it is detached from the balloon I believe the air opens it and it becomes a great umbrella." "I think I should be

careful to open my umbrella before I jumped," said Ned.

"Yes," said Phippy, "and then think how you would clutch the handle!" "People who come down in parachutes," said her mother, "are in a basket, and probably sit very still. I believe the descent at first is fearfully swift, but becomes slower after the parachute is fairly opened. There was a descent made once in a parachute from a height of twelve hundred feet."

A Parachute open.

"Whew! more than five times the height of Bunker Hill Monument. I should want to hang a lot of little umbrellas and parasols all about. Do you suppose, aunt, they will ever cross the Atlantic in balloons?"

"I should not dare to say what might not be done some day."

"How fine it would be," said Phippy, "to see father sail down

gracefully into our garden!

"Or even cross the continent," added Nathan. "We might almost go over that with an umbrella in a high wind."

"We must get the United States done before he comes back," said Lucy. "You have n't written him anything about it, have you, mamma?"

"No, we will keep it for a surprise for him." So the children went back to their work. Indeed, it was so engrossing an occupation that they had agreed to give up the idea of making a set of checkers.

CHAPTER V.

IN THE LOW COUNTRIES.

WHILE the Bodley children were traveling over their own country in Paul Bodley's Pasture, Mr. Bodley himself was following his business, which kept him some time in London, and then was to take him to the Continent. Every week brought a letter from him and was read aloud in the family, often with the atlas upon the table, that the children might trace their father's wanderings. He was spending Sunday in Antwerp, and wrote thence of his recent journey.

"The last day I was in London I had occasion to call on an old gentleman, who is quite poor but a scholar, and lives in the garret of a house in one of the densest quarters of the city. I climbed the dark staircase to his room and knocked, but no one answered.