"'_Two_ are too _many_ for this little balloon,' he said; 'she's going too slow! We shall not reach the moon before morning at _this_ rate. _Get out of this!_' "I was wholly unnerved. I could have calmed the fears, or reasoned down the apprehensions of a reasonable companion; but my present _compagnon du voyage_ 'lacked discourse of reason' as much as the brute that perisheth, and remonstrance was of no avail. "'GET OUT OF THIS!' he repeated, in tones strangely piercing, in the hush of the upper air; and thereupon I felt myself seized by a grasp, so often superhumanly powerful in madmen, and found myself suddenly poised over the side of the tilting car, and heard the _hum_ of the tortured gas in its silken prison above us: "'Good-night!' said the infuriated wretch; 'you'll hear from me by telegraph from the moon! They can't catch me now! Ha! ha!--not now! _not now!_'" It was but a dream of an aeronaut, reader, after all, on the night before his ascension; and this sketch is but a dream _of_ that dream; for it is from memory, and not "from the record." * * * * * As the fall rains may be expected, as the almanacs predict, "about these days" of autumn, we put on early record, for the next month, the fact, that umbrellas are not protected by the laws of the United States. They are not property, save that of the man of whom you buy them. They constitute an article which, by the morality of society, you may steal from friend or foe, and which, for the same reason, you should not lend to either. The coolest thing--the most doubly-iced impudence--we ever heard of, was in the case of a man who borrowed a new silk umbrella of a town-neighbor, which, as a matter of course, he forgot to return. One morning, in a heavy rain, he called on his neighbor for it. He found him on the steps, going out with the borrowed umbrella. He met him with that peculiar smile that one man gives another who suddenly claims his umbrella on a wet day, and said: "Where are you going, Mr. B----?" "I came for my umbrella," was the brief reply. "But don't you see I am going out with it at this moment? It's a very nasty morning." "Going _out_ with my umbrella! What am _I_ to do, I should like to know?" "_Do?_--do as _I_ did--_borrow_ one!" said the borrower, as he walked away, leaving the lender well-nigh paralyzed at the great height of his neighbor's impudence. A church is the place, of a rainy Sunday, where many indifferent and valuable "exchanges" are made, in the article of umbrellas. Perhaps many of our readers will remember the remark made at the close of morning service, on a drizzly Sabbath, by a pious brother: