The clear sun of a fine September day, was glittering on roof and steeple, and the cheerful breeze of early autumn breathing its harp-like melody over woods and waters. A vast multitude stood around me, attentively watching the expanding folds of my balloon, as it swayed to and fro in the unsteady air. As I prepared to take my place in its car, I noticed an involuntary shudder run through the assemblage, and anxious glances pass from face to face. At length, the process of inflation was completed, the music sounded, the gun was discharged, the ropes were loosened, and the beautiful machine arose in the air, amid the resounding cheers of thousands. As it ascended, I cast a hasty look on the sea of upturned heads, and thought I read one general expression of anxiety, in the faces of the multitudinous throng, and my heart warmed with the consciousness, that many kind wishes and secret hopes were wafted with me on my heavenward flight. But very soon, mine eye ceased to distinguish features and forms, and the collected throng became blended in one confused mass, and the green common itself had dwindled into a mere garden-plat, and the magnificent old Elm in its centre to a stunted bush, waving on the hill-side. Upward, upward! my flying car mounted and mounted, into the yet untraversed highways of the air, swifter than pinion-borne bird, or canvas-borne vessel, yet all without sound of revolving wheel, or clatter of thundering hoof or straining of bellying sail, or rustle of flapping wing. I felt that I was indeed alone, in the upper wastes of the liquid element, a solitary voyager of the sky, careering onward like the spectral "Ship of the Sea," with no murmur of bubbling billow under the prow, and no gush of whirling ripple beneath the keel. But how can my pen describe the sublimity of the scene above, below and around! At one moment, my car would plunge into silvery seas of vapor and rolling billows of mist, through which the dim-seen sun did but feebly glimmer, like the struggling flame of the torch cast in the dungeon's gloom. But soon that shadowy veil dissolved away, and again I would emerge into the blaze of the golden sun, and the effulgence of the blue heavens. How then did I covet the painter's art, to be able to imprint on the eternal canvas, those gorgeous clouds piled up around me, like hills and mountains, from whose sides hoary cataracts seemed to be falling, and foamy streams leaping into the vallies, that rested in lovely repose at their base. Never did the dull world below present on its diversified bosom, such grand or such enchanting objects, as those beautiful and evanescent creatures of the air, shining and shifting in the levelled sunbeams around. At times, my whole horizon would be bounded by those mountainous regions of cloud-land, cliff lifting over cliff, pinnacle above pinnacle, Alps above Alps. On their sides and tops, the reflected light painted all the hues of the rainbow, in commingled azure and