"You see," she said, "I didn't feel nervous as another woman might, because I'd been living with balloons for years. Besides they hitched me fast to the parachute ropes so I couldn't have fallen if I'd wanted to. It was lovely going up; everybody said we made a beautiful ascension, and the two balloons kept so close together that the other lady and I were talking all the way. At last, when we were up about three thousand feet, she called out that my balloon was settling and for me to cut. But I called back: 'Cut yourself,' and, sure enough, she did in a minute, and I watched her parachute open out and sink and get smaller and smaller, until she reached the ground. A few minutes later, when I saw my balloon had really settled, I cut, too. H-o-o-o, what a sensation! You know those awful dreams where you fall and fall? Well, it's just like that for two or three seconds, until your parachute fills wide and springs you up against the ropes. Then you sail down, down, with a lovely easy motion until you get close to the ground. But look out for the landing. Once I struck in a treetop. And you're liable to come down on houses or anything."
"You're liable to come down in the middle of a lake," put in "Kid" Benjamin.
"Do you go up?" said I to the "Kid," whose hands and face showed black smears from painting balloon-cloth. He was certainly not over eighteen.
"Do I?" he answered, with a grin. "I made more'n twenty ascensions and drops last summer."
"He's the one," said Mrs. Stevens, "who carried that boy up hanging from the parachute ropes. Don't you remember? At Coney Island? The boy was helping hold the balloon, and when she started his foot got caught."
"And he went up hanging by his foot?"
The "Kid" nodded. "Yep, stuck fast in the rigging by one shoe. As I sat on the trapeze bar there was that boy forty feet above me kicking and yelling. Say, you'd never guess what he was yelling about."
"I suppose he was afraid?"
The "Kid" shook his head. "No, sir; he didn't seem to mind the eight hundred feet we'd gone up, not a bit. What worried him was sixty cents in pennies and nickels that had spilled out of his pants pockets while he was upside down."
Then the "Kid" explained how he postponed his parachute drop on this occasion and got down safely, boy and all, by letting the balloon cool off and gradually settle to the ground.