This from the professor.
“Indeed? Then how do you account for it, professor, that all attempts to navigate a balloon have hitherto failed?” asked the colonel.
“Begause, my dear zir, the aeronauts have never yed realised all the requiremends of zuccess,” replied the professor, laying down his magazine as though quite prepared to go thoroughly into the question.
The colonel accepted the challenge, and, rousing himself from his semi-recumbent posture, said:
“That is quite possible; but what are the requirements of success?”
The professor knocked the ashes out of his meerschaum, refilled it with the utmost deliberation, carefully lighted it, gave a few vigorous puffs, and replied:
“The requiremends of zuccess in balloon navigation are very zimilar to those which enable a man to draverse the ocean. If a man wants to make a voyage agross the ocean he embargs in a ship, not on a life-buoy. Now a balloon is nothing more than a life-buoy; id zusdains a man, but that is all. Id drifts aboud with the currends of air jusd as a life-buoy drifts aboud with the currends of ocean, and the only advandage which the aeronaud has over the man with the life-buoy is thad the former can ascend or descend in search of a favourable air currend, whereas the ladder is obliged do dake the ocean currends as they come.”
“Very true,” remarked the colonel; “and what do you deduce from that, professor?”
“I deduse from thad thad the man who wands to navigade the air musd do as his brother the sailor does, he musd have a ship.”
“Well, is not a balloon a sort of air ship?”