minutes! Puck's promise kept! the seven-league boots outdone! [Illustration: JOHN WISE.] Upon his son, Charles E. Wise, and his grandson, John Wise, Jr., he bestowed his skill and engrafted his enthusiasm. The latter began his aeronautical career with his teens, and though not yet out of them has made over forty ascensions. One of these excursions, made in the autumn of 1875 from Waynesburg, Greene county, Pennsylvania, sufficiently demonstrates, if any demonstration is needed, that a boy's luck and pluck are equal to anything. It had been raining the proverbial pitchforks all day, and the hydrogen oozed into the gas-bag with even more than its accustomed sluggishness. The curiosity of a country crowd was not easily damped, however, and the basket was finally attached and Master Johnny stepped on board. The aerostat sensibly refused to consider the proposition for an ascension, although urged by the successive relinquishment of barometer, lunch, water-bottle, coat, drag-rope and grapnel. As a last resort, the entire lower third of the gas-bag, which was uninflated, was cut away, the valve-cord by accident sharing the same fate, leaving an opening about seventeen feet in diameter. Then, "the crowd having given us room, father asked me whether I felt timid about going. I told him I was determined to go if the balloon would take me. He said, 'Good-bye, Johnny:' I said, 'Good-bye,' and found myself shooting up into space on a cold, rainy October day, coatless, without ropes, anchor or valve-cord, the rags of the balloon fluttering in the breeze created by the sudden ascent; the multitude vociferously cheering me one moment and the next calling me to come back for God's sake! But I only replied by hurrahing and waving my hat, feeling perfectly _cool_, and rather enjoying the excitement of the vast crowd that was now fast disappearing below me. In seven minutes the earth vanished from my sight, and I passed from a driving rain below the clouds into a dense snowstorm above them. My feet and hands were almost numb with cold, and the prospect was about as cheerless as it well could be, when a thought passed through my brain that made me laugh outright. I had heard of people coming down in bursted balloons, but I was the first who had ever gone up in one. The idea appeared so ridiculous that it really made me feel warmer." Think of this aerial babe in the woods, with Nature's awful forces warring about him and the earth lost to view, laughing himself warm over a joke at the expense of his terrible situation! Truly, "he jests at scars that never felt a wound." Perhaps it was the balloon, but I believe it could only have been his good angel, that brought the boy safely down into a small cleared space in a forest thirty-eight minutes and forty miles from the point of departure. [Illustration: WASHINGTON H. DONALDSON.]