April, 1, 2848NOW, my dear friend--now, for your sins, you are to suffer the infliction of a long gossiping letter. I tell you distinctly that I am going to punish you for all your impertinences by being as tedious, as discursive, as incoherent and as unsatisfactory as possible. Besides, here I am, cooped up in a dirty balloon, with some one or two hundred of the canaille, all bound on a pleasure excursion, (what a funny idea some people have of pleasure!) and I have no prospect of touching terra firma for a month at least. Nobody to talk to. Nothing to do. When one has nothing to do, then is the time to correspond with ones friends. You perceive, then, why it is that I write you this letter--it is on account of my ennui and your sins.Get ready your spectacles and make up your mind to be annoyed. I mean to write at you every day during this odious voyage.Heigho! when will any Invention visit the human pericranium? Are we forever to be doomed to the thousand inconveniences of the balloon? Will nobody contrive a more expeditious mode of progress? The jog-trot movement, to my thinking, is little less than positive torture. Upon my word we have not made more than a hundred miles the hour since leaving home! The very birds beat us--at least some of them. I assure you that I do not exaggerate at all. Our motion, no doubt, seems slower than it actually is--this on account of our having no objects about us by which to estimate our velocity, and on account of our going with the wind.