There's pleasure in a lively trip when sailing through the air. The word is given, "Let her go!"--to land I know not where. The view is grand: 'tis like a dream when many miles from home: My castle in the air I love, above the clouds to roam. Not an ideal character certainly, but a complete one in its way, and readily recognizable as belonging to a born aeronaut. The unromantic but not unusual inability of a professional predecessor to pay his board-bill, obliging him to leave his balloon with mine host as surety, first placed in Donaldson's hands the means by which he became afterward best known. Fearless as he undoubtedly was, an ascension was undertaken with the misgivings which usually preface an initial stepping from terra firma to the inconstant air. Once aloft, however, with the widespreading splendor and endless immensity of the earth's surface unrolling beneath him, and an exquisite physical exhilaration thrilling along his nerves, Donaldson became heart and soul an aeronaut. The novel and sensational expedients with which he embellished his subsequent ascensions are well known. Becomingly dressed in tights, he delighted to sail away skyward hanging by one hand from a trapeze-bar, generally terminating a variety of feats thereon by poising himself a moment on his back, then suddenly dropping backward, catching by his feet on the side-ropes--easy and safe enough, doubtless, with his preliminary acrobatic training, but blood-curdling to the breathless spectators beneath. He left drawings for a jointed bar which, at the proper time, should apparently break in two and leave him dangling to one of the pieces. For a consideration which the citizens of Binghamton, New York, sensibly declined to give he offered to ascend to the height of a mile in a paper balloon, there set fire to it and descend in a parachute. [Illustration: DONALDSON'S DANGER.]