In a few simple words he told me that he and his family lived in a small village. With infinite grief they had read the article charging his father with unmanly conduct--a grief that was the greater because they possessed no means to refute the charge. Brokenly, with tears of gratitude, he told of their joy in reading my statements in his father's defence, and how he had been impelled to come and try in person to express to me the gratitude he felt he could not write. Poor though this man may be in this world's goods, in the record of his father's character and deeds he owns a legacy fit to give him place among the Peers of Real Manhood. Through some mischance I have lost the address of Donaldson's son. Should he happen to read these lines I hope he will communicate with me. CHAPTER VI AN AERIAL BIVOUAC In the history of contests since man first began striving against his fellows, seldom has a record performance stood so long unbroken as that of the good airship _Barnum_, made thirty-three years ago. Of her captain and crew of five men, six all told, the writer remains the sole survivor, the only one who may live to see that record broken in this country. The _Barnum_ rose at 4 p.m. July 26, 1874, from New York and made her last landing nine miles north of Saratoga at 6.07 p.m. of the twenty-seventh, thus finishing a voyage of a total elapsed time of twenty-six hours and seven minutes. In the interim she made four landings, the first of no more than ten minutes; the second, twenty; the third, ten; the fourth, thirty-five; and these descents cost an expenditure of gas and ballast which shortened her endurance capacity by at least two or three hours. Tracing on a map her actual route traversed, gives a total distance of something over four hundred miles, which gave her the record of second place in the history of long-distance ballooning in this country, a record which she still holds. So far as my knowledge of the art goes, and I have tried to read all of its history, the _Barnum's_ voyage of twenty-six hours, seven minutes was then and remained the world's endurance record until 1900; and it still remains, in point of hours up, the longest balloon voyage ever made in the United States. The longest voyage in point of distance ever made in this country was that of John Wise and La Mountain, in the fifties, from St. Louis, Mo., to Jefferson County, N. Y., a distance credited under the old custom of a little less than twelve hundred miles, while the actual distance under the new rules is between eight hundred and nine hundred miles, the time being nineteen hours. This voyage also remained, I believe, the world's record for distance until 1900, and still remains the American record--and lucky, indeed, will be the aeronaut who beats it.