The countrymen below described the balloon as apparently enveloped by the lightning, but with ourselves, though the flashes were incessant, and on all sides, the reverberations of the thunder were not remarkable, being rather brief explosions in which they resembled the thunder claps not infrequently described by travellers on mountain heights. The balloon was now descending from a double cause: the weight of moisture suddenly accumulated on its surface, and the very obvious downrush of cold air that accompanied the storm of pelting hail. With a very limited store of ballast, it seemed impossible to make a further ascent, nor was this desirable. The signalling experiments on which we were intent could not be carried on in such weather. The only course was to descend, and though this was not at once practicable, owing to Savernake Forest being beneath us, we effected a safe landing in the first available clearing. As has been mentioned, Mr. Glaisher and other observers have recorded several remarkable instances of opposite wind currents being met with at moderate altitudes. None, however, can have been more noteworthy or surprising than the following experience Of the writer on Whit Monday of 1899. The ascent was under an overcast sky, from the Crystal Palace at 3 p.m., at which hour a cold drizzle was settling in with a moderate breeze from the east. Thus, starting from the usual filling ground near the north tower, the balloon sailed over the body of the Palace, and thence over the suburbs towards the west till lost in the mist. We then ascended through 1,500 feet of dense, wetting cloud, and, emerging in bright sunshine, continued to drift for two hours at an average altitude of some 3,000 feet; 1,000 feet below us was the ill-defined, ever changing upper surface of the dense cloud floor, and it was no longer possible to determine our course, which we therefore assumed to have remained unchanged. At length, however, as a measure of prudence, we determined to descend through the clouds sufficiently to learn something of our whereabouts, which we reasonably expected to be somewhere in Surrey or Berks. On emerging, however, below the cloud, the first object that loomed out of the mist immediately below us was a cargo vessel, in the rigging of which our trail rope was entangling itself. Only by degrees the fact dawned upon us that we were in the estuary of the Thames, and beating up towards London once again with an cast wind. Thus it became evident that at the higher level, unknown to ourselves, we had been headed back on our course, for two hours, by a wind diametrically opposed to that blowing on the ground.