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"The principle," writes Mr. Monck Mason, "upon which all these parachutes were constructed is the same, and consists simply of a flattened dome of silk or linen from 24 feet to 28 feet in diameter.
The said machine, according to the magazine, was formed of two parachutes which might be folded up or extended at pleasure, while the person who worked them was placed in the centre. This account, however, was rather misleading, for the magazine carefully avoided mention of a balloon to which the inventor fixed his wings or parachutes.
"All right; drop away," the boat captain called. There was a gush, from underneath, of eight-inch spheres, their conductor-mesh twinkling golden-bright in the sunlight. They dropped in a tight cluster for a thousand or so feet and then flashed and vanished. From the ground, six or eight aircars rose to meet the descending parachutes and catch them.
The first hint he received that the observation balloon was in difficulties came when he saw the two observers leap into space with their parachutes, and a tiny spiral of smoke ascend from the fat and helpless "sausage." Tam dived for the pirate machine firing both guns then, for the second time that day, the mechanism of his gun went wrong.
Had she ever noticed the way the seeds came fluffing out of the cinnamon cones and the asters and the golden rod and the fire flower in September, for all the world like fairies sailing pixie parachutes? People said that autumn was sad, it presaged death! Did it?
Seeds and berries fell, and rolled into hollows rich in mulcted earth; parachutes, buoyed on thistle silk, sailed from distant jungle plants; every swirl of breeze brought spores of lichens and moss, and even the retreating water unwittingly aided, having transported hither and dropped a cargo of living things, from tiniest plant to seeds of mightiest mora.
The wind roared and whistled in their ears, and they both thought the parachutes would never open in time to prevent their being dashed to atoms on the ground. But when they were less than two hundred feet from the ground, each felt a sudden checking of the plummet-like drop and knew that the parachutes had at last taken hold.
Still higher in the evolutionary scale than the elastic fruits are those airy species which have taken to themselves wings like the eagle, and soar forth upon the free breeze in search of what the Americans describe as 'fresh locations. Of this class the simplest type may be seen in those forest-trees, like the maple and the sycamore, whose fruits are flattened out into long expansions or parachutes, technically known as 'keys, by whose aid they flutter down obliquely to the ground at a considerable distance.
And if you think he could take that ride without wishing to the "nth" degree that she could be with him to share the joy, then, I assure you, you don't know to what music those gay, twinkling, trembling gold leaves above the Brulé were beating time all night to the whisper of the wind and rustle of the pixy parachutes sailing mid-air.
Then, via Alexander of Macedon, "one of the greatest sons of earth," as Bishop Thirlwall had called him Alexander, with whose deplorable capacity for "unbending" a scholar like Eames was perfectly familiar he would switch the conversation into realms of military science, and begin to expatiate upon the wonderful advance which has been made since those days in the arts of defensive and offensive warfare the decline of the phalanx, the rise of artillery, the changed system of fortifications, those modern inventions in the department of land defences, sea defences and, above all, aerial defences, parachutes, hydroplanes. . . .
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