Do you remember that hot September afternoon at the county fair when you sat perched on the white-washed race-track fence, your face turned skyward, and watched with fascinated eyes the tiny yellow globule, high, high in the blue, which you had seen rise from the ground half an hour before as a giant gas-balloon? And do you remember how, as you watched, the band in the grand stand suddenly stopped playing and an awed hush fell upon the crowd, and you saw a tiny something detach itself from the yellow globule and drop into space, at first falling with sickening speed, then slower, still slower, until the object, which you knew was a man in pink tights (though sometimes, in order to heighten the sensation, it was a young and, of course, beautiful woman), landed quite gently in a distant field? In those days we little dreamed that the strange, umbrella-like contrivance which brought the aeronaut safely to earth would ever be used for any other purpose than to thrill the admission-paying multitudes, but the emergencies and necessities provoked by the Great War turned things with which we were all familiar to unfamiliar uses, as, for example, when it converted a farm tractor into a fighting-tank. Thus it was that the observers came to use parachutes to escape from their burning balloons just as the inmates of an office-building dash down the iron fire-escapes when somebody shouts “Fire!” At first the individual or one-man parachute was used to insure the escape of the observer in the basket from his burning balloon, but though the man escaped, the valuable maps and records were lost. In order to save these records there was invented the basket parachute. This was considerably larger in diameter than the individual parachute, and when cut away brought the basket with all that it contained—men, records, instruments, everything—safely and quickly to the ground. All the observer had to do was to pull a cord and he started downward. It was easier than stepping into an elevator and saying: “Ground floor, please.” Amazingly few fatalities occurred in the hundreds of cases in which the individual and basket parachutes were used in actual war service or in training. I heard of one balloon observer who was forced to make four parachute jumps in a single day, and of another who made three in four hours, two balloons being burned over his head. Thirty parachute jumps were made by American observers during the Argonne offensive alone. Yet the safety of the parachute is demonstrated beyond all question by the fact that during the entire time the American forces were in the field only one death occurred as the direct result of a parachute drop, and in that particular instance the burning balloon fell directly on top of the open parachute, setting it on fire and allowing the observer to fall the rest of the distance to the earth. [Illustration: A BASKET PARACHUTE DROP. The basket parachute brings men, instrument, and records safely to the ground.]