It is needless to detain the reader with the particulars of our return. They were such only as occur to thousands in the rough and circuitous transit between San Francisco and New York. We came home by the Isthmus route, and in ships that ploughed the honest waves. We explained our absence to our disturbed families and friends as best we might; and some will remember--and if they do not, they can refresh their recollection by a reference to the public prints--that several missing gentlemen of some importance in the world, about that time, suddenly reappeared upon the stage of action.
We resolved that the whole affair in which we had been engaged should remain forever buried in oblivion. But time and reflection have wrought a change with me, though I shall not presume to disturb the veil which covers my associates. I have come to consider the adventure quite too good to be lost, and the experiment in aerial navigation, which came so near proving successful, of too much importance to science to be suppressed. Hence, conquering my repugnance, I have decided, on my own responsibility, to give these interesting and valuable particulars to the world.
Exactly,--Dog-Talk. And I sit down to write some of it out, in the middle of this pleasant month of May, lest, peradventure, if I postpone my task for a few weeks longer, I may fall in with my memories some time in the raging days of the dog-star, when the overwhelming sense of dog, in which, for the true working out of these memories, I must first dip my mind, may debar me from enjoying to the fullest extent the bounteous tap of Croton water which tinkles with such rivulet chiming from the silver (German) faucet into the marble (wash-hand) basin with which one side of my apartment is adorned. Hydrophobia is one thing, and hydrophobiaephobia is another.
Although but the mid-time of May, as I have said, the thermometer is reported at something not far short of eighty degrees, and that in as much shade as can possibly be had in the street in which I write, which is a brick street of New York, with one catalpa-tree in it,--a poor, vegetable fakir, standing on his one leg at a distance of about three blocks from "our corner," and sprawling out all round with his shrivelled hands, as if to catch the passing robe of some rambling breath of fresh air. With a trustful hope that this statement may be accepted in extenuation of the inevitable platitudinism down the gently inclined plane of which I feel myself impelled to slide into my memories, I will endeavor to bring some of the latter to the surface.
