The sun was shining, and the sky was so blue. Above our heads flew a hundred balloons. There was green Jimmy, rosy red Polly, yellow Johnny, purple Susan, and my own dear blue self, Bobby. We’ve come together to speak a little about ourselves, each one telling its own tale.
“I’ll begin,” said green Jimmy. “I came into this world, as I believe many little boys and girls here will, at a child’s birthday party. Master Johnny fished for apples with me one day, came up so excitedly with me, and knocked against the ceiling, while my poor head nearly burst with the doing. Then I was left lying about and floating on the water of a bowl till at last I popped myself, and the party went on very merry without me.
“Next I floated over a church with a paper attached, giving the name and address and a hundred little verses of poetry and pretty sayings, and where those who received me were to be sure to write. You see, my poor little recording friend hung on for three days trying to get some word of him who sent them, and got several little notes attached to me in the blossoms of trees and hedges, and quite a large prosy sort of letter, enclosed in a bottle, from a man who says he picked it out of the river about fifteen miles from where it was let off. When I returned home, my poor little attaching friend was quite worn out with reading and writing, and all the poetical yearning for answers, but he said it all paid him and was worth the trouble for the fun. After that I joined a lot more of my coloured friends and floated down the river on a pic-nic day with nuts and ginger-beer and a nice little hamper basket, where I found some very agreeable companions in myself, as there were oranges, bananas, and other good things in the hamper. Lately I took part in a Fete all by myself, being suddenly released by a gust of wind when the clergy were singing about ‘Faith working by love.’ I went up higher, higher, ever higher, till I nearly passed out of this world altogether; but finding that uncomfortable, I gently I say gently floated down, though with a nil aim to pass on a Frisian balloon man. I think this last mode of travelling was the pleasantest of the whole.
“What do you say, red Polly? Are the dangers of your profession less than those of ours?”
“Far less,” replied Polly. “I have been fifty times round the earth, and not met much worse than snow and rain. I generally fly where I am sent on some good or pleasurable purpose. I have taken men to distant lands, and brought wives to husbands after years of waiting. I see some history and two nations lining up about my little friend Rosa Milly. The one is Unity in Variety, the Power of Woman for Good, the other, Young Men’s Christian Society. She is needless to say a superbly white lady with lighted-up face, low necked and flowing skirt, of every nationality and men of all nations should pass under her—which sounds silly, but you see what I mean—if the world is to be educated according to her lessons. And that you know why, green John is at the steering oar where four little restively or throbbingly drumming away. Onward, onward. Happy indeed am I to be the physical and abstract agent of acting for so magnanimous a Semiramis-in-the-midst-of-cooking! Now, Sir Halford—lovely blossom though your name is, I am afraid one dear to all heart to name pacific—do you not think some little pretty address might make us all somewhat less croaking than the tone of the amphibia kingdom in the Mud-Clouds? Fancy it addressing old sax’s or playground pals from your shore friend hoding to learn by Mitching or Evans-by-Tinger’s—might make some people hold out a gaping mouth for a couple of months.
Green Johnny was so busy gnawing an apple he only bit out his reply from it, but Polly seemed to take a sort of Orson or Hoightshiney view of it altogether. I had made up my mind to follow suit, but my next-door neighbour, Peter, inlaid with gold leaf of thoughts, drove on too cleverly for me. There’s no use resisting the invisible bonds of attraction, just so as those North-East-South-West market street birds
“In the danger of every port,
The Landlord’s service must ever court.”
“That is the beauty of sucking,” he added most solitarily cool and cocky forward—my variation as me kid sister called him.