Will you pe take
      de odder pottle, or ave you pe got zober yet and come to your
      zenzes?”

      I made haste, hereupon, to nod my head twice—once in the
      negative, meaning thereby that I would prefer not taking the
      other bottle at present—and once in the affirmative, intending
      thus to imply that I _was_ sober and _had_ positively come to my
      senses. By these means I somewhat softened the Angel. “Und you pelief, ten,” he inquired, “at te last? You pelief, ten,
      in te possibilty of te odd?”

      I again nodded my head in assent. “Und you ave pelief in _me_, te Angel of te Odd?”

      I nodded again. “Und you acknowledge tat you pe te blind dronk and te vool?”

      I nodded once more. “Put your right hand into your left hand preeches pocket, ten, in
      token ov your vull zubmizzion unto te Angel ov te Odd.”

      This thing, for very obvious reasons, I found it quite impossible
      to do. In the first place, my left arm had been broken in my fall
      from the ladder, and, therefore, had I let go my hold with the
      right hand, I must have let go altogether. In the second place, I
      could have no breeches until I came across the crow. I was
      therefore obliged, much to my regret, to shake my head in the
      negative—intending thus to give the Angel to understand that I
      found it inconvenient, just at that moment, to comply with his
      very reasonable demand! No sooner, however, had I ceased shaking
      my head than—

      “Go to der teuffel, ten!” roared the Angel of the Odd. In pronouncing these words, he drew a sharp knife across the
      guide-rope by which I was suspended, and as we then happened to
      be precisely over my own house, (which, during my peregrinations,
      had been handsomely rebuilt,) it so occurred that I tumbled
      headlong down the ample chimney and alit upon the dining-room
      hearth. Upon coming to my senses, (for the fall had very thoroughly
      stunned me,) I found it about four o’clock in the morning. I lay
      outstretched where I had fallen from the balloon. My head
      grovelled in the ashes of an extinguished fire, while my feet
      reposed upon the wreck of a small table, overthrown, and amid the
      fragments of a miscellaneous dessert, intermingled with a
      newspaper, some broken glass and shattered bottles, and an empty
      jug of the Schiedam Kirschenwasser. Thus revenged himself the
      Angel of the Odd. [Mabbott states that Griswold “obviously had a revised form” for
      use in the 1856 volume of Poe’s works. Mabbott does not
      substantiate this claim, but it is surely not unreasonable. An
      editor, and even typographical errors, may have produced nearly
      all of the very minor changes made in this version. (Indeed, two
      very necessary words were clearly dropped by accident.) An editor
      might have corrected “Wickliffe’s ‘Epigoniad’” to “Wilkie’s
      ‘Epigoniad’,” but is unlikely to have added “Tuckerman’s
      ‘Sicily’” to the list of books read by the narrator. Griswold was
      not above forgery (in Poe’s letters) when it suited his purpose,
      but would have too little to gain by such an effort in this
      instance.] MELLONTA TAUTA

TO THE EDITORS OF THE LADY’S BOOK:


      I have the honor of sending you, for your magazine, an article
      which I hope you will be able to comprehend rather more
      distinctly than I do myself. It is a translation, by my friend,
      Martin Van Buren Mavis, (sometimes called the “Poughkeepsie
      Seer”) of an odd-looking MS. which I found, about a year ago,
      tightly corked up in a jug floating in the Mare Tenebrarum—a sea
      well described by the Nubian geographer, but seldom visited
      now-a-days, except for the transcendentalists and divers for
      crotchets. Truly yours,

      EDGAR A. POE

{this paragraph not in the volume—ED}

ON BOARD BALLOON “SKYLARK”

      _April_, 1, 2848

      Now, 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. To be sure, whenever we meet a balloon we have a chance of
      perceiving our rate, and then, I admit, things do not appear so
      very bad. Accustomed as I am to this mode of travelling, I cannot
      get over a kind of giddiness whenever a balloon passes us in a
      current directly overhead. It always seems to me like an immense
      bird of prey about to pounce upon us and carry us off in its
      claws. One went over us this morning about sunrise, and so nearly
      overhead that its drag-rope actually brushed the network
      suspending our car, and caused us very serious apprehension. Our
      captain said that if the material of the bag had been the
      trumpery varnished “silk” of five hundred or a thousand years
      ago, we should inevitably have been damaged. This silk, as he
      explained it to me, was a fabric composed of the entrails of a
      species of earth-worm. The worm was carefully fed on mulberries—a
      kind of fruit resembling a water-melon—and, when sufficiently
      fat, was crushed in a mill. The paste thus arising was called
      papyrus in its primary state, and went through a variety of
      processes until it finally became “silk.” Singular to relate, it
      was once much admired as an article of female dress! Balloons
      were also very generally constructed from it.