Page:Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.djvu/295

Rh people so long as they can keep them in the air; but sooner or later they're bound to swoop back to their dead horse, and you'll get the buzzard smell.

Hot air can take up a balloon a long ways, but it can't keep it there. And when a fellow's turning flip-flops up among the clouds, he's naturally going to have the farmers gaping at him. But in the end there always comes a time when the parachute fails to work. I don't know anything that's quite so dead as a man who's fallen three or four thousand feet off the edge of a cloud.

The only way to gratify a taste for scenery is to climb a mountain. You don't get up so quick, but you don't come down so sudden. Even then, there's a chance that a fellow may slip and fall over a precipice, but not unless he's foolish enough to try short-cuts over slippery places; though some men can manage to fall down the hall stairs and break their necks. The path isn't