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I asked. "The most beautiful woman in the world," said Mrs. Hovey. This from a woman who was herself beautiful! Amazing! I suppose my face betrayed my thought. "It isn't charity," she smiled. "Like John Holden, I have seen fire-balloons by the hundred, I have seen the moon, and then I saw no more fire-balloons." "But who is she?" Hovey explained. "She is the wife of Senor Ramal.
This difficulty was solved by The Man from Everywhere on his reappearance the night before the Fourth, after an absence of a whole week, laden with every manner of noise and fire making arrangement for the Infant, though I presently found that Bart had partly instigated the outfit, and the two overgrown boys revelled in fire-balloons and rockets under cover of the Infant's enthusiasm, much as the grandpa goes to the circus as an apparent martyr to little Tommy's desire!
Why should not you and Vere come to dine at the Hotel, or in the Galleria, with me? I will ask Panacci to join us, and we will all go on afterwards to see the illuminations, and the fireworks, and the sending up of the fire-balloons. What do you say?" "Would you like it, Vere?" "Immensely, Madre." She spoke quietly, but she looked pleased at the idea.
Here it was a real holiday, that woke you with bells and cannon who has forgotten the time the ancient piece of ordnance in "the Square" blew out all the windows in the Methodist church? and went on with squibs and crackers till you didn't know where to step on the sidewalks, and ended up splendidly with rockets and fire-balloons and drunken Indians vociferous on their way to the lock-up.
Nothing was altered in these teeming galleries, except that turbid daylight had imperceptibly given place to this other dimness, in which lanterns swung like tethered fire-balloons. Life went on, mysteriously, without change or sleep. While the two white men shouldered their way along, a strange chorus broke out, as though from among the crowded carcasses in a butcher's stall.
This was in fact the statement of the principles on which fire-balloons were afterwards constructed and successfully sent up, excepting that air heated by fire, instead of fire itself, was used.
At length dinner was over, and immediately there was a rush to the windows to see the fireworks, which seemed to be all let off at once, so that it was impossible to distinguish anything but a universal twisting and whirling, and fizzing and cracking; and an elephant looked very brilliant for a moment, and then went off through his eyes with a bang, and was no more; sham men exploded; and real men jumped into sparkling, crackling flames; and rockets and fire-balloons went up; so that, if the lessee of Vauxhall or Cremorne could let off or send up half as many things as were let off and went up on this occasion in the court-yard of the Lucknow Durbar, he would make a fortune.
This lovely place, with its beautiful and romantic surroundings loved and exquisitely described by more than one poet, cannot fail to be dear to those who know it with and through them. Here, in a garden in front of their rose and myrtle covered cottage, within near sound of the rushing Lynn, would Shelley stand on a mound and let off his fire-balloons in the cool evening air.
Imagine fourteen-thousand fire-balloons with an approach to regularity in a spherical space say, ten miles in diameter; there would be an average of less than thirty in every cubic mile, and it would be necessary to go to a considerable distance in order to see them as a globular aggregation; yet from a point sufficiently far away they would blend into a glowing ball.
The process was slow, as the gas had to be generated in large quantities by means of diluted sulphuric acid and iron filings put into wooden casks disposed round a large cistern, from which it was conveyed through water in long leaden pipes. To keep the impatient populace quiet, therefore, during the tedious operation, Montgolfier sent up one of his fire-balloons.
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