"Well," said the professor (I can see his eyes twinkling), "if this balloon doesn't make noise enough we'll get a bigger one."
They took the balloon some miles out of Washington (the professor insisted on this), filled it with a terribly explosive mixture of oxygen and hydrogen, and sent it up about a quarter of a mile, with an anchor-rope holding it and a wire hanging down to a little hand-dynamo or blasting-machine. As they made ready to turn this dynamo, Professor Myers lay flat on his back, eyes glued to the balloon, confident but curious. The handle turned, a spark jumped at the other end, and the ball of silk seemed to swell enormously and then vanish with a flash of a thousand shivers of silk. On this came the sound—a smashing and tearing blast louder than any thunder-crash or roar of cannon. It flattened men to the ground, killed hundreds of little fish in a stream near by (bursting their air-bladders), knocked over a bowling-alley like a house of cards, frightened cattle, and brought down rain in torrents within eight minutes. The Agricultural gentlemen were more than satisfied, and adopted the professor's system for extended rainfall experiments—only these (for obvious reasons) were removed to the lonely and arid plains of distant Texas.
"It wasn't much fun living down there," said the professor; "but we got rain whenever we wanted it."
"What would happen," I inquired, "if a very large balloon filled with this explosive mixture were set off over a crowded city?"
The professor shook his head in his awed contemplation of this possibility. "It would work fearful destruction. If large enough (and there is no difficulty in obtaining such a size), it would wipe out of existence whole blocks of houses and the people in them. It would destroy an army."
In the course of our talks I discovered a mystic side, very unexpected, in the professor's nature. He used to speak of hydrogen, for instance, with a certain almost reverence, as if it were something endowed with life and consciousness, a powerful spirit, one would say, not merely a commonplace product of chemistry, a gas from a retort.
A BALLOON-PICNIC AT THE AËRONAUTS' HOME.
"I have often wondered," he said one day, "as my basket has swept me along, what there is in this silken bag above me that lifts me thus over mountains and cities. I look up into the balloon through the open mouth, and I see nothing; I hear nothing; I smell nothing. None of my senses answer any call; yet somehow, strangely, in a way I can't explain, I perceive a presence. It would not be at all the same to me were the balloon filled with air, though it would be the same to all my senses. Again and again I have noted this thing, that hydrogen makes itself known to men when they are near it."