I glanced at the altitude-registering instrument; we were up two thousand feet! Then, suddenly, without the slightest warning, my brain cleared, and I remembered the valve, the opening of which would cause the great gas-bag to descend. But where was it? Which was the valve-rope? The car seemed all ropes as I turned anxiously this way and that. I tried one after another, and at last, to my joy, I felt one give. Then I smelt the escaping gas, and knew that I had struck the right cord. Very soon I realized that our upward way was checked, and that instead we were descending. I do not know how long we took over the downward trip. I only remember that I pulled the rope, then slacked it, and so on alternately until we could faintly hear the shouts of those below. Presently the boy plucked up courage to look over the side of the car, and, wild with joy, called out that we were saved. Fortunately for us, there was practically no wind; we went up straight and came down straight, landing safely in a field only some two hundred yards from the spot where we ascended. I collapsed as they helped me out of the car, and the other man, directly he alighted, rushed headlong away--the ordeal had turned his brain. Giving evidence before the coroner the following Monday at the inquest on poor Tickner, I still felt decidedly shaky, and to my dying day I shall never forget my trip in the runaway balloon. [Illustration: THE FIELD IN WHICH THE BALLOON DESCENDED. _From a Photograph._] Some “Freak” Memorials. BY T. W. WILKINSON. When a man, especially a wealthy man, sets out to erect a memorial to something or somebody, there is no knowing what eccentricity he will not commit. Scattered up and down this country, as the writer shows, are a number of most remarkable memorials--“freaks” of the first water, from whatever standpoint one judges them. Who shall impose limits on the intent and form of memorials? He would be a brave man indeed who attempted the task; yet, though it is very difficult to say precisely where the line should be drawn, there are a number of such things in existence which, judged by the commonly-accepted standards, are distinctly “freakish.” They range from public statues plain to all men to small stones in arcadian aloofness, and, as a whole, go far to justify the oft-repeated taunt of the “intelligent foreigner”--a taunt amounting to an implication--that memorials afford an outlet for much of the Englishman’s eccentricity and sheer “pig-headedness.”