So much for what you first feel; and now what is the first thing you do? In this case every body is alike. We all do the same thing. We look over the side of the car. We do this very cautiously--keeping a firm seat, as though we clung to our seat by a certain attraction of cohesion--and then, holding on by the edge, we carefully protrude the peak of our traveling-cap, and then the tip of the nose, over the edge of the car, upon which we rest our mouth. Every thing below is seen in so new a form, so flat, compressed and simultaneously--so much too-much-at-a-time--that the first look is hardly so satisfactory as could be desired. But soon we thrust the chin fairly over the edge, and take a good stare downward; and this repays us much better. Objects appear under very novel circumstances from this vertical position, and ascending retreat from them (though it is _they_ that appear to sink and retreat from us). They are stunted and foreshortened, and rapidly flattened to a map-like appearance; they get smaller and smaller, and clearer and clearer. "An idea," says Monck Mason, "involuntarily seizes upon the mind, that the earth with all its inhabitants had, by some unaccountable effort of nature, been suddenly precipitated from its hold, and was in the act of slipping away from beneath the aeronaut's feet into the murky recesses of some unfathomable abyss below. Every thing, in fact, but himself, seems to have been suddenly endowed with motion." Away goes the earth, with all its objects--sinking lower and lower, and every thing becoming less and less, but getting more and more distinct and defined as they diminish in size. But, besides the retreat toward minuteness, the phantasmagoria flattens as it lessens--men and women are of five inches high, then of four, three, two, one inch--and now a speck; the Great Western is a narrow strip of parchment, and upon it you see a number of little trunks "running away with each other," while the Great Metropolis itself is a board set out with toys; its public edifices turned into "baby-houses, and pepper-casters, and extinguishers, and chess-men, with here and there a dish-cover--things which are called domes, and spires, and steeples!" As for the Father of Rivers, he becomes a dusky-gray, winding streamlet, and his largest ships are no more than flat pale decks, all the masts and rigging being foreshortened to nothing. We soon come now to the shadowy, the indistinct--and then all is lost in air. Floating clouds fill up all the space beneath. Lovely colors outspread themselves, ever-varying in tone, and in their forms or outlines--now sweeping in broad lines--now rolling and heaving in huge, richly, yet softly-tinted billows--while sometimes, through a great opening, rift, or break, you see a level expanse of gray or blue fields at an indefinite depth below. And all this time there is a noiseless cataract of snowy cloud-rocks falling around you--falling