Chapter 4

Sir Marmaduke was a good old English gentleman, all of the olden time. There you see him, in his old-fashioned dining-room, with his old-fashioned wife holding her old-fashioned distaff, while he is surrounded by his old-fashioned arms, pets, and furniture.

On his hand he holds his hawk, and his dogs are enjoying the great wood fire. His saddle is thrown on the floor; his hat and his pipes lie near it; his sword and his cross-bows are stood up, or thrown down, anywhere at all, and standing by his great chair is something which looks like a coal-scuttle, but which is only a helmet.

Sir Marmaduke was certainly a fine old gentleman. In times of peace he lived happily with his family, and was kind and generous to the poor around him. In times of war he fought bravely for his country.

But what a different old gentleman would he have been had he lived in our day!

Then, instead of saying "Rebeck me!" and "Ods Boddikins!" when his hawk bit his finger or something else put him out of humor, he would have exclaimed, "Oh, pshaw!" or, "Botheration!" Instead of playing with a hawk, he would have had a black-and-tan terrier,--if he had any pet at all; and his wife would not have been bothering herself with a distaff, when linen, already spun and woven, could be bought for fifty cents a yard. Had she lived now, the good lady would have been mending stockings or crocheting a tidy.

Instead of a pitcher of ale on his supper-table, the good knight would have had some tea or coffee; and instead of a chine of beef, a mess of pottage, and a great loaf of brown bread for his evening meal, he would have had some white bread, cakes, preserves, and other trifles of that sort, which in the olden days were considered only fit for children and women. The good old English gentlemen were tremendous eaters. They used to take five meals a day, and each one of them was heavy and substantial.

If Sir Marmaduke had any sons or daughters, he would have treated them very differently in the present day. Instead of keeping them at home, under the tuition of some young clergyman or ancient scholar, until they should be old enough and accomplished enough to become pages to a great lord, or companions to some great lady, he would have sent them to school, and the boys--the younger ones, at least--would have been prepared for some occupation which would support them, while the girls would have been taught to play on the piano and to work slippers.

In these days, instead of that old helmet on the floor, you would have seen a high-top hat--that is, if the old gentleman should continue to be as careless as the picture shows him; instead of a cross-bow on the floor, and another leaning against the chair, you would have seen a double-barrelled gun and a powder-horn; and instead of the picturesque and becoming clothes in which you see Sir Marmaduke, he would have worn some sort of a tight-fitting and ugly suit, such as old gentlemen now-a-days generally wear.

There were a great many advantages in the old style of living, and also a very great many disadvantages. On the whole, we should be very thankful indeed that we were born in this century, and not in the good old times of yore.

A little boy once made a very wise remark on this subject. He said: "I wish I could have seen George Washington and Israel Putnam; but I'm glad I didn't, for if I'd been alive then, I should have been dead now."

There is enough in that boy's remark for a whole composition, if any one chose to write it.

THE GIRAFFE.

Some one once called the Giraffe a "two-story animal," and the remark was not altogether inapplicable.

As you see him in the picture, lying down, he seems to be high enough for all ordinary purposes; but when he stands up, you will see that his legs--or his lower story--will elevate him to a surprising height.

The ordinary giraffe measures about fifteen feet from the top of his head to the ground, but some of them have been known to be over sixteen feet high. Most of this height is owing to their long necks, but their fore-legs are also very long. The hind-legs seem much shorter, although, in reality, they are as long as the fore-legs. The legs and neck of the Giraffe are made long so that he can eat the leaves from the tops of young trees. This tender foliage is his favorite diet; but he will eat the foliage from any part of a tree, and he is content with the herbage on the ground, when there is nothing else.

He is not a fighting animal. Those little horns which you see on his head, and which look as if they had been broken off--although they are really their full size--are of no use as offensive weapons. When danger threatens him he runs away, and a funny sight he is then. He can run very fast, but he is very awkward; he goes like a cow on stilts.

But when there is no chance for him to run away, he can often defend himself, for he can kick like a good fellow. His hind-legs fly so fast when he is kicking that you can hardly see them, and he has been known to drive off a lion by this means of defence.

When hunters wish to catch a giraffe alive, they generally drive him into a thick woods, where his great height prevents him from running very rapidly; and as soon as they come up with him, they endeavor to entangle him in ropes, to throw him down, and to put a halter round his neck. If they only keep out of the way of his heels, there is no need of being afraid of him. When they have secured him they lead him off, if he will come; but if he is an old fellow he will not walk after them, and he is too strong to be easily pulled along, no matter how many men may be in the hunt. So in this case they generally kill him, for his skin is valuable, and his flesh is very good to eat. But if the giraffe is a young one, he will follow his captors without difficulty, for these animals are naturally very gentle.

Why the natives of Africa should desire to obtain living giraffes, unless it is to sell them to people who wish to carry them to other countries, travellers do not inform us. We have never heard that any domestic use was made of them, nor that they were kept for the sake of their meat. But we suppose the hunters know their own business.

It is probable that the lion is really the greatest enemy of the giraffe. It is not often that this crafty and powerful hunter will put himself within reach of his victim's heels. Approaching softly and slowly, the lion waits until he is quite near the giraffe, and then, with one bound, he springs upon his back. Sometimes the giraffe succeeds in shaking him off, but generally they both fall together--the giraffe dead, and the lion with his appetite whetted for an enormous dinner.

UP IN THE AIR.

We have already taken a journey under the earth, and now, if you like, we will try a trip in the air. Anything for a novelty. We have lived on the surface of the earth ever since we were born.

We will make our ascent in a balloon. It has been thought by some folks, that there were easier methods of ascending into the air than by a cumbrous balloon, but their inventions never became popular.

For instance, look at the picture of a flying-man.

This gentleman had an idea that he could fly by the aid of this ingenious machinery. You will see that his wings are arranged so that they are moved by his legs, and also by cords attached to his arms. The umbrella over his head is not intended to ward off the rain or the sun, but is to act as a sort of parachute, to keep him from falling while he is making his strokes. The basket, which hangs down low enough to be out of the way of his feet, is filled with provisions, which he expects to need in the course of his journey.

That journey lasted exactly as long as it took him to fall from the top of a high rock to the ground below.

But we are not going to trust ourselves to any such _harem-scarem_ contrivance as this. We are going up in a regular balloon.

We all know how balloons are made, and this one of ours is like most others. It is a great globular bag, made of strips of silk sewn together, and varnished with a certain composition which renders the balloon air-tight. The car in which we will travel is made of wicker-work, for that is both light and strong, and it is suspended from a net-work of strong cord which covers the whole balloon. It would not do, you know, to attach a cord to any particular part of the silk, for that would tear it. In the top of the balloon is a valve, and a cord from it comes down into the car. This valve is to be pulled open when we wish to come down towards the earth. The gas then escapes, and of course the balloon descends. In the car are bags of sand, and these are to be emptied out when we think we are too heavy for the balloon, and are either coming down too fast or are not as high as we wish to go. Relieved of the weight of a bag, the balloon rises.

Sand is used because it can be emptied out and will not injure anybody in its descent. It would be rather dangerous, if ballooning were a common thing, for the aëronauts to throw out stones and old iron, such as are used for the ballast of a ship. If you ever feel a shower of sand coming down upon you through the air, look up, and you will probably see a balloon--that is, if you do not get some of the sand in your eyes.

The gas with which our balloon is to be filled is hydrogen gas; but I think we will not use the pure hydrogen, for it is troublesome and expensive to produce. We will get permission of the city gas authorities to take gas from one of their pipes.

That will carry us up very well indeed. When the balloon is nearly full--we never fill it entirely, for the gas expands when it rises into lighter air, and the balloon would explode if we did not leave room for this expansion--it is almost as round as a ball, and swells out proudly, struggling and pulling at the ropes which confine it to the ground.

Now we have but to attach the car, get in, and cut loose. But we are going to be very careful on this trip, and so we will attach a parachute to the balloon. I hope we may not use it, but it may save us in case of an accident. This is the manner in which the parachute will hang from the bottom of the car.

It resembles, you see, a closed umbrella without a handle, and it has cords at the bottom, to which a car is attached. If we wish to come down by means of this contrivance, we must descend from the car of the balloon to that of the parachute, and then we must unfasten the rope which attaches us to the balloon. We shall then drop like a shot; but as soon as the air gets under our parachute it will spread open, and our descent will immediately begin to be much more gradual, and if nothing unusual occurs to us, we shall come gently to the ground. This picture shows the manner in which we would come down in a parachute.

This man's balloon has probably burst, for we see it is tumbling down, and it will no doubt reach the ground before him.

When all is ready and we are properly seated in the car, with our instruments and extra clothes and ballast, and some provisions, we will give the word to "let her go."

There!

Did you see that?

The earth dropped right down. And it is dropping, but more slowly, yet.

That is the sensation persons generally experience when they first go up in a balloon. Not being used to rising in the air, they think at first that they are stationary, and that the earth and all the people and houses on it are falling below them.

Now, then, we are off! Look down and see how everything gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller. As we pass over a river, we can look down to its very bottom; and if we were not so high we could see the fishes swimming about. The houses soon begin to look like toy-cottages, and the trees like bushes, and the creeks and rivers like silvery bands. The people now appear as black spots; we can just see some of them moving about; but if they were to shout very loud we might hear them, for sound travels upward to a great distance.

Soon everything begins to be mixed up below us. We can hardly tell the woods from the fields; all seem pretty much alike. And now we think it is getting foggy; we can see nothing at all beneath us, and when we look up and around us we can see nothing but fog.

We are in the clouds! Yes, these are the clouds. There is nothing very beautiful about them--they are only masses of vapor. But how thick that vapor is! Now, when we look up, we cannot even see the balloon above us. We are sitting in our little basket-work car, and that is all we know! We are shut out from the whole world, closed up in a cloud!

But this foggy atmosphere is becoming thinner, and we soon shoot out of it! Now we can see clearly around us. Where are the clouds? Look! there they are, spread out like a great bed below us.

How they glisten and sparkle in the bright sunlight!

Is not this glorious, to ride above the clouds, in what seems to us illimitable space! The earth is only a few miles below us, it is true, but up and around us space _is_ illimitable.

But we shall penetrate space no longer in an upward direction. It is time we were going back to the world. We are all very cold, and the eyes and ears of some of us are becoming painful. More than that, our balloon is getting too large. The gas within it is expanding, on account of the rarity of the air.

We shall pull the rope of the valve.

Now we are descending. We are in the clouds, and before we think much about it we are out of them. We see the earth beneath us, like a great circular plain, with the centre a little elevated. Now we see the rivers; the forests begin to define themselves; we can distinguish houses, and we know that we are falling very rapidly. It is time to throw out ballast. We do so, and we descend more slowly.

Now we are not much higher than the tops of the trees. People are running towards us. Out with another bag of sand! We rise a little. Now we throw out the anchor. It drags along the ground for some distance, as the wind carries us over a field, and then it catches in a fence. And now the people run up and pull us to the ground, and the most dangerous part of our expedition is over.

For it is comparatively safe to go up in a balloon, but the descent is often very hazardous indeed.

On the preceding page is a picture of a balloon which did not come down so pleasantly as ours.

With nine persons in it, it was driven over the ground by a tremendous wind; the anchors were broken; the car was bumped against the ground ever so many times; and the balloon dashed into trees, breaking off their branches; it came near running into a railroad train; it struck and carried away part of a telegraph line, and at last became tangled up in a forest, and stopped. Several of the persons in it had their limbs broken, and it is a wonder they were not all killed.

The balloon in which we ascended was a very plain, common-sense affair; but when aerial ascents were first undertaken the balloons were very fancifully decorated.

For instance, Bagnolet's balloon and that of Le Flesselles, of which we have given you pictures, are much handsomer than anything we have at present. But they were not any more serviceable for all their ornamentation, and they differed from ours in still another way--they were "hot-air balloons."

Other balloons were furnished with all sorts of fans, rudders, etc., for the purpose of steering them, or accelerating their motion up or down.

On the next page is one of that kind.

This balloon ascended from Dijon, France, in 1784, but the steering-apparatus did not prove to be of much use.

There were other balloons devised by the early aëronauts, which were still stranger than that one which arose from Dijon. The _Minerva_, the picture of which you can examine at your leisure, was invented by a Mr. Robertson, in the beginning of this century. He wished to make a grand aerial voyage of several months, with a company of about sixty persons, and therefore he had to have a very large balloon. To procure this he desired the co-operation of the scientific men throughout Europe, and sent plans and descriptions of his projected balloon to all the learned societies.

This great ship of the air was to be a regular little town, as you may see. The balloon was to be one hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and was to carry a large ship, on which the passengers would be safe if they descended in the water, even if it were the middle of the ocean.

Everything was to be provided for the safety and convenience of the passengers. Around the upper part of the balloon you will see a platform, with sentries and tents. These soldiers were to be called the "air-marines." There is a small balloon--about the common size--which could be sent off like a small boat whenever occasion required. If any one got tired of the expedition, and wanted to go home, there was a parachute by which he might descend. On the deck of the ship, near the stern, was to be a little church; small houses hung from below, reached by ladders of silk, which were to be used as medicine-rooms, gymnasiums, etc.; and under the ship would hang a great hogshead, as big as a house, which would contain provisions and stores, and keep them tight and dry. There was also a kitchen; and a cannon, with which to fire off salutes, besides a number of guns, which you see projecting from the port-holes of the ship. These, I suppose, were to be used against all enemies or pirates of the air, sea, or land.

I cannot enumerate all the appendages of this wonderful balloon--you see there are telescopes, sails, great speaking-trumpets, anchors, etc.; but I will merely remark that it was never constructed.

One of the safest, and sometimes the most profitable, methods of using a balloon, is that shown in the picture, "Safe Ballooning." Here a battle is going on, and the individuals in the balloon, safely watching the progress of events and the movements of the enemy, transmit their observations to the army with which they are connected. Of course the men on the ground manage a balloon of this sort, and pull it around to any point that they please, lowering it by the ropes when the observations are concluded. Balloons are often used in warfare in this manner.

But during the late siege of Paris, balloons became more useful than they have ever been since their invention. A great many aëronauts left the besieged city, floated safely over the Prussian army, and descended in friendly localities. Some of these balloons were captured, but they generally accomplished their purposes, and were of great service to the French. On one occasion, however, a balloon from Paris was driven by adverse winds to the ocean, and its occupants were drowned.

It has not been one hundred years since the balloon was invented by the brothers Montgolfier, of France. They used heated air instead of gas, and their balloons were of course inferior to those of the present day. But we have not improved very much upon the original balloon, and what progress will eventually be made in aerial navigation it is difficult to prophesy. But there are persons who believe that in time air-ships will make regular trips in all directions, like our present steamboats and railroad-trains.

If this is ever the case, I hope we may all be living to see it.

THE HORSE OF ARABIA.

The Arabian horse has long been celebrated as the most valuable of his race. He is considered an aristocrat among horses, and only those steeds which can trace their descent from Arabian ancestors have the right to be called "thorough-bred."

Occasionally an Arabian horse is brought to this country, but we do not often see them. In fact, they would not be as valuable here as those horses which, besides Arabian descent, have also other characteristics which especially adapt them to our country and climate.

In Arabia the horse, as an individual, especially if he happens to be of the purest breed, is more highly prized than in any other part of the world. It is almost impossible to buy a favorite horse from an Arab, and even if he can be induced to sell it, the transaction is a very complicated one. In the first place, all the relations and allies of the owner must give their consent, for the parting with a horse to a stranger is a very important matter with them. The buyer must then make himself sure that the _whole of the horse_ belongs to the man who is selling him, for the Arabs, when they wish to raise money, very often do so by selling to a member of their tribe a fore-leg, a hind-leg, or an ear, of one of their horses; and in this case, the person who is a part owner of the animal must have his proportionate share of all profits which may arise from its sale or use. This practice is very much like our method of mortgaging our lands.

When the horse is finally bought and paid for, it had better be taken away as soon as possible, for the Arabs--even those who have no interest whatever in the sale--cannot endure to see a horse which once belonged to their tribe passing into the hands of strangers. And therefore, in order to soothe their wounded sensibilities, they often steal the animal, if they can get a chance, before the buyer carries him out of their reach.

The Arabian horse is generally much more intelligent and docile than those of our country. But this is not altogether on account of his good blood. The Arab makes a friend and companion of his horse. The animal so constantly associates with man, is talked to so much, and treated so kindly, that he sometimes shows the most surprising intelligence. He will follow his master like a dog; come at his call; stand anywhere without moving, until his master returns to him; stop instantly if his rider falls from his back, and wait until he mounts again; and it has been said that an Arabian horse has been known to pick up his wounded master from the field of battle, and by fastening his teeth in the man's clothes, to carry him to a place of safety.

There is no doubt, if we were to treat our horses with gentleness and prudence, and in a measure make companions of them whenever it was possible, that they would come to regard us with much of the affection and obedience which the Arabian horse shows to his master.

INDIAN PUDDINGS: PUMPKIN PIES.

Some of the good old folks whom I well remember, called these things "Ingin-puddins and punkin pies," but now we all know what very incorrect expressions those were. Rut, even with such highly improper names, these delicacies tasted quite--as well in those days as they do now, and, if my youthful memory does not mislead me, they tasted a little better.

There is no stage of the rise and progress of Indian puddings and pumpkin pies, with which, when a youngster, I was not familiar. In the very beginning of things, when the fields were being ploughed, "we boys" were there. True, we went with no intent to benefit either the corn-crop or the pumpkin-vines. We merely searched in the newly turned-up earth for fish-worms. But for all that, we were there.

And when the corn was all planted, how zealous we used to be about the crows! What benevolent but idiotic old scarecrows we used to construct, and how _extremely_ anxious we were to be intrusted with guns, that we might disperse, at once and forever, these black marauders! For well we knew that a few dead crows, stuck up here and there on stakes, would frighten away all the rest of the flock.