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,