"'Ah, ha! then I am safe! they can't catch me now! I escaped from them only this morning!'
"With a vague sense of some impending evil, I asked:
"'Escaped!—how!—from where?'
"'From the lunatic asylum! They thought I was crazed, and sent me there to be confined. Crazed! Why, there's not a man in London so sane as I am, and they knew it. It was a trick, sir—a trick! A trick to get my estate! But I'll be even with 'em! I'll show 'em! I'll thwart em!'
"Good Heavens! I was now a mile from the earth, with a madman for my companion!—in a frail vessel, where the utmost caution and coolness were necessary, and where the least irregularity or carelessness would send us, through the intervening space with the speed of thought, to lie, crushed and bleeding masses of unrecognizable humanity, upon the earth.
"But I had not long to think of even this apparently inevitable fate; for my companion had seized upon the sand-bags, and, one after another, was throwing them over the side of the car.
"'Hold! rash man!' I exclaimed: 'what would you do? You are endangering both our lives!'
"All this time the balloon was ascending with such rapidity, that the rush of the air through the net-work was like the wild whistling of the wind in the cordage of a ship under bare poles, in a gale at sea.
"'What do I do?' repeated the madman; 'I am getting away! I am going to the moon!—I am going to the moon!—ha! ha! They can't catch us in the moon!'
"He had exhausted nearly all the ballast except what was under or near me, and we were rising at such an astounding speed that I expected every moment that the balloon would burst from the increasing expansion, when I observed him loosening his garments and taking off his coat.