The Twenty-One Balloons

Half of this story is true and the other half might very well have happened.

The best way of travel, however, if you aren't in any hurry at all, if you don't care where you are going, if you don't like to use your legs, if you don't want to be annoyed at all by any choice of directions, is in a balloon. In a balloon, you can decide only when to start, and usually when to stop. The rest is left entirely to nature.

It seems strange to me that mechanical progress always seems to leave the slower demands of elegance far behind.

That's the peculiar thing about nature," explained Mr. F., "it guards it's rarest treasures with greatest care.