The Cloud King, Or, Up in the Air, and Down in the Sea
by William Stephens Hayward (9780217577779)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE START. 13 Jacko was capering and dancing about in mad delight at seeing my " much big bag" floating in the air, with myself seated beneath. I waved an adieu to him, and, with feelings of unbounded pride and exul tation, took hold of the knot and commenced loosening it. At that moment a shout attracted my attention, and casting my eyes in the direction whence it came, I saw my father, followed by one of his labourers, running towards me. Noticing my absence from the "claim" that morning,?a thing which had never happened before,?he had come in search of me, and, to his intense surprise, had found me calmly floating in the air in a balloon, only held to the earth by one thin cord. I heard him call to me to come down, at the same time running towards the rope which held me. For one instant I hesitated,'and then with sudden resolution loosened the knot and let the rope slip through. To my utter surprise, I felt no motion Was my balloon, then, the work of so many months, a failure ? I gazed around me in dismay, then down on the earth, and learned the truth. The earth appeared to be miraculously vanishing from my sight. / ivas shooting up in the air with inconceivable velocity, though the motion ivas quite imperceptible CHAPTER IV. UP IN THE AIB. My feelings at that moment I can never describe. The morning was bright and sunny; white, fleecy, fine-weather clouds being the only ones in the sky. The panorama-like view below me was glorious in the extreme. There, stretched beneath me, were the golden valleys of California, with the thousands of diggers at work, looking, from the elevation at which14 UP IN THE AIR I was, like so many ants. Then, far away to the west, I could perceive a faint blue line, which I knew to be the Pacific Ocean, and could distingui...

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