TO THE EDITORS OF THE LADY'S BOOK:
I have the honor of sending you, for your magazine, an article which I hope you will be
able to comprehend rather more distinctly than I do myself. It is a translation, by my
friend, Martin Van Buren Mavis, (sometimes called the "Poughkeepsie Seer") of an odd-
looking MS. which I found, about a year ago, tightly corked up in a jug floating in the
Mare Tenebrarum --- a sea well described by the Nubian geographer, but seldom visited
now-a-days, except for the transcendentalists and divers for crotchets.
ON BOARD BALLOON "SKYLARK"
NOW, my dear friend --- now, for your sins, you are to suffer the infliction of a long
gossiping letter. I tell you distinctly that I am going to punish you for all your
impertinences by being as tedious, as discursive, as incoherent and as unsatisfactory as
possible. Besides, here I am, cooped up in a dirty balloon, with some one or two hundred
of the canaille, all bound on a pleasure excursion, (what a funny idea some people have
of pleasure!) and I have no prospect of touching terra firma for a month at least. Nobody
to talk to. Nothing to do. When one has nothing to do, then is the time to correspond with
ones friends. You perceive, then, why it is that I write you this letter --- it is on account of
my ennui and your sins.
Get ready your spectacles and make up your mind to be annoyed. I mean to write at
you every day during this odious voyage.
Heigho! when will any Invention visit the human pericranium? Are we forever to be
doomed to the thousand inconveniences of the balloon? Will nobody contrive a more
expeditious mode of progress? The jog-trot movement, to my thinking, is little less than
positive torture. Upon my word we have not made more than a hundred miles the hour
since leaving home! The very birds beat us --- at least some of them. I assure you that I
do not exaggerate at all. Our motion, no doubt, seems slower than it actually is --- this on
account of our having no objects about us by which to estimate our velocity, and on
account of our going with the wind. To be sure, whenever we meet a balloon we have a
chance of perceiving our rate, and then, I admit, things do not appear so very bad.
Accustomed as I am to this mode of travelling, I cannot get over a kind of giddiness
