"How can we do otherwise? Surely you don't mean to travel the whole distance in the balloon? I thought, of course, you would adopt the present fashionable mode of travelling, and after mounting the seventeen miles or thereabouts, which is necessary to get clear of the mundane attraction, to wait there till the turning of the globe should bring Egypt directly under our feet."
"But it is not in the same latitude."
"True; I did not think of that! Well, then," sighing deeply, "I suppose we must do without the hamper?"
"Certainly; and without those boxes and bottles too, I hope."
"Oh no! we can't do without those. Those bottles contain my magic elixir, that cures all diseases merely by the smell:—a new idea that. You know it has been long discovered, that the whole materia medica might be carried in a ring, and that all the instruments of surgery might be compressed into a walking-stick. But the idea of sniffing health in a pinch of snuff is, I flatter myself, exclusively my own."
"Very likely; but we cannot be encumbered with your panaçea in our aërial tour."
"Then that box contains my portable galvanic battery; that, my apparatus for making and collecting the inflammable air; and that, my machine for producing and concentrating the quicksilver vapour, which is to serve as the propelling power to urge us onwards, in the place of steam; and these bladders are filled with laughing gas, for the sole purpose of keeping up our spirits."
"The three first will be useful," said Edric; "but I will positively have no more."
"Adieu! adieu! then, my precious treasures!" exclaimed the doctor, looking sorrowfully around: "Dear offspring of my cares! children of my mind! and must I leave you to some rude hand, which, heedless of your inestimable worth, may scatter your beauties to the winds? Alas! alas!"
"Breakfast is ready, and my lord is waiting!" interrupted the shrill voice of one of Lord Gustavus's servants.