Six or seven years ago I read in the columns of the Sun an article copied from a Chicago paper, evidently written by some close friend of the unfortunate Grimwood, making a bitter attack upon Donaldson for having sacrificed his passenger's life to save his own. The story moved me so much that I wrote an open letter to the Sun over my own signature, in which I sought to refute the charge by recounting the story of Donaldson's noble conduct, and his constant readiness for self-sacrifice in other situations quite as dire.
A few days later, sitting in my office, I was frozen with astonishment when a written card was handed in to me bearing the name "Washington H. Donaldson"! As soon as I could recover myself, the bearer of the card was asked in. He was a man within a year or two of my friend's age at the time of his death, Wash Donaldson's very self in face and figure! He had the same bright, piercing eye, that looked straight into mine; the same lean, square jaws and resolute mouth; the same waving hair, the same low, cool, steady voice—such a resemblance as to dull my senses, and make me wonder and grope to understand how my friend could thus come back to me, still young after so many years.
It was Donaldson's son, a babe in arms at the time his father sailed away to his death!
In a few simple words he told me that he and his family lived in a small village. With infinite grief they had read the article charging his father with unmanly conduct—a grief that was the greater because they possessed no means to refute the charge. Brokenly, with tears of gratitude, he told of their joy in reading my statements in his father's defence, and how he had been impelled to come and try in person to express to me the gratitude he felt he could not write.
Poor though this man may be in this world's goods, in the record of his father's character and deeds he owns a legacy fit to give him place among the Peers of Real Manhood.
Through some mischance I have lost the address of Donaldson's son.
Should he happen to read these lines I hope he will communicate with me.
CHAPTER VI
AN AERIAL BIVOUAC
In the history of contests since man first began striving against his fellows, seldom has a record performance stood so long unbroken as that of the good airship Barnum, made thirty-three years ago. Of her captain and crew of five men, six all told, the writer remains the sole survivor, the only one who may live to see that record broken in this country.
The Barnum rose at 4 p.m. July 26, 1874, from New York and made her last landing nine miles north of Saratoga at 6.07 p.m. of the twenty-seventh, thus finishing a voyage of a total elapsed time of twenty-six hours and seven minutes. In the interim she made four landings, the first of no more than ten minutes; the second, twenty; the third, ten; the fourth, thirty-five; and these descents cost an expenditure of gas and ballast which shortened her endurance capacity by at least two or three hours.