nearer like the details of a real journey your small incidents are, the better your readers will be pleased with your large incidents. It is the little surprises of familiarity among strangeness that create the emotion of pleasure. Last of all, and first of all, and altogether requisite is this virtue: To be a good narrator of imaginary voyages, you must be, like Defoe, the "best of liars." Nothing is too stupendous to tell if you only know how to tell it. =Mellonta Tauta= On Board Balloon "Skylark," April 1, 2848. Now, my dear friend--now, for your sins, you are to suffer the infliction of a long gossiping letter. I tell you distinctly that I am going to punish you for all your impertinences by being as tedious, as discursive, as incoherent, and as unsatisfactory as possible. Besides, here I am, cooped up in a dirty balloon, with some one or two hundred of the _canaille_, all bound on a _pleasure_ excursion (what a funny idea some people have of pleasure!), and I have no prospect of touching _terra firma_ for a month at least. Nobody to talk to. Nothing to do. When one has nothing to do, then is the time to correspond with one's friends. You perceive then, why it is that I write you this letter--it is on account of my _ennui_ and your sins. Get ready your spectacles and make up your mind to be annoyed. I mean to write at you every day during this odious voyage. Heigho! when will any _Invention_ visit the human pericranium? Are we forever to be doomed to the thousand inconveniences of the balloon? Will _nobody_ contrive a more expeditious mode of progress? The jog-trot movement, to my thinking, is little less than positive torture. Upon my word, we have not made more than a hundred miles the hour since leaving home! The very birds beat us--at least some of them. I assure you that I do not exaggerate at all. Our motion, no doubt, seems slower than it actually is--this on account of our having no objects about us by which to estimate our velocity, and on account of our going with the wind. To be sure, whenever we meet a balloon we have a chance of perceiving our rate, and then, I admit, things do not appear so very bad. Accustomed as I am to this mode of traveling, I cannot get over a kind of giddiness whenever a balloon passes us in a current directly overhead. It always seems to me like an immense bird of prey about to pounce upon us and carry us off in its claws. One went over us this morning about sunrise, and so nearly overhead that its drag-rope actually brushed the net-work suspending our car, and caused us very serious apprehension. Our captain said that if the material of the bag had been the trumpery varnished "silk" of five hundred or a thousand years ago, we should inevitably have been damaged. This silk, as he explained it to me, was a fabric composed of the entrails of a species of earth-worm. The worm was carefully fed on mulberries--a