The lookers-on, knowing that Spalding was ambitious, expected to hear him in the tuneful choir, but he was dumb. He was once or twice, by those nearest to him, heard in song, and literally heard only, for it is believed that he never allowed any manuscript testimony of such a weakness to leave his custody. One satirical performance got popularity by being committed to memory. It was called "The fire-balloon." In the year 1828 there was an arousing of public sympathy with the sufferers by a great conflagration at Merimachi in North America. A body of the students who had imbibed from the Professor of Natural Philosophy an enthusiasm about aerostation, proposed to raise money for the sufferers by making and exhibiting a huge fire balloon. The effort was embarrassed by many difficulties and adventures affording opportunity for the satirist. For instance, a trial trip was attempted, and one of "the committee," who was the son of a clergyman, got hold of the key of his father's church, and put its interior at the disposal of his colleagues. The balloon inflated and ascended. The problem of getting it down again, however, had not been solved. It got itself comfortably at rest in the roof of a cupola, and the young philosophers then had to wait until it became exhausted enough to descend. The literary ambition of young Aberdeen found for itself a very sedate and respectable looking organ in "_The Aberdeen Magazine_," published monthly during the years 1831 and 1832, and still visible in two thick octavo volumes. Spalding was not to be tempted into this project, though there was a slight touch in it supposed, solely from internal evidence, to have come from him. A heavy controversy was begun by one calling himself "a classical reformer," who brought up foemen worthy of his steel. At the end of the whole was a sting in a postscript, more effective than anything in the unwieldy body it was attached to. P. S. As I am no great scholar, perhaps your classical Reformer will have the goodness to tell me where I can see _The Works of Socrates_. He seems to allude to them twice [reference to pages]. As he modestly tells us that he is a much better translator of Homer than Pope was, perhaps he will be kind enough to favour the world with a translation, to use his own words, of "those works which have immortalized the name of Socrates."[xvii-1]