AIR-UM SCARE-UM TRAVELLING.
"Who's for the excursion round the moon?
Here's the 'Original Fly Balloon.'"
"Is it this that calls
At the top of St. Paul's,
Where I'm to take up my wife and babby?"
"No, sir, it's not ours;
We only touch at the towers
Of Westminster Abbey."
We stop at the Great Bear,
To take in air;
Then at once, without waiting at all, we fly on,
In hopes of being in time to hear
Some of the music of the sphere,
Accompanied by the band of Orion.
What a funny sensation it is the clouds to enter:
Oh, don't you know the reason why
You feel rather comic when up in the sky?
'Tis caused by your distance from gravity's centre.
But here's the Zodiac, where we dine,
The Bull or the Lion is the sign;
To stop at Aquarius does not answer,
But we call to-day at the Crab, if we Can-sir.
Here's a lawyer wants to be starting soon,
To watch the action of the moon;
A barrister wishes much to know
If a place is vacant, that he may go
To study the laws of the stars' rotation,
With them keep pace,
As they roll through space,
And join their circuit in the long vacation.
The day of railways will be o'er,
And steam will be esteem'd no more,
When the result is seen
Of the experiment of Mr. Green,
Who says he can, as a matter of course,
In a balloon the Atlantic cross;
And, by way of proving he can,
He shows us a part of his plan,
Which looked, in miniature, very neat,
At the Polytechnic in Regent Street,
And answered, the truth to tell,
Uncommonly well,
As far as it went; but, the fact to say,
It went but a very little way.
Air-um Scare-um Travelling.
No one could doubt the success of the notion,
If Hanover Square
One might compare
To the wide Atlantic Ocean.
It's a very fine thing,
To take hold of a string
Attached to a pretty toy balloon,
Guiding it easily either way,
And undertaking to say
The Atlantic may be traversed soon,
By similar means;
Which will be credited by men
When all the world are Greens,
But not till then!