in the papers. Butteridge'll know of it
and come along--on my track."

Butteridge would be a terrible person to be on any one's track.
Bert thought of the great black moustaches, the triangular nose, the
searching bellow and the glare. His afternoon's dream of a marvellous
seizure and sale of the great Butteridge secret crumpled up in his mind,
dissolved, and vanished. He awoke to sanity again.

"Wouldn't do. What's the good of thinking of it?" He proceeded slowly
and reluctantly to replace the Butteridge papers in pockets and
portfolio as he had found them. He became aware of a splendid golden
light upon the balloon above him, and of a new warmth in the blue dome
of the sky. He stood up and beheld the sun, a great ball of blinding
gold, setting upon a tumbled sea of gold-edged crimson and purple
clouds, strange and wonderful beyond imagining. Eastward cloud-land
stretched for ever, darkling blue, and it seemed to Bert the whole round
hemisphere of the world was under his eyes.

Then far, away over the blue he caught sight of three long, dark shapes
like hurrying fish that drove one after the other, as porpoises follow
one another in the water. They were very fish-like indeed--with tails.
It was an unconvincing impression in that light. He blinked his eyes,
stared again, and they had vanished. For a long time he scrutinised
those remote blue levels and saw no more....

"Wonder if I ever saw anything," he said, and then: "There ain't such
things...."

Down went the sun and down, not diving steeply, but passing northward as
it sank, and then suddenly daylight and the expansive warmth of daylight
had gone altogether, and the index of the statoscope quivered over to
Descente.

3

"NOW what's going to 'appen?" said Bert.

He found the cold, grey cloud wilderness rising towards him with a wide,
slow steadiness. As he sank down among them the clouds ceased to seem
the snowclad mountain-slopes they had resembled heretofore, became
unsubstantial, confessed an immense silent drift and eddy in their
substance. For a moment, when he was nearly among their twilight masses,
his descent was checked. Then abruptly the sky was hidden, the last
vestiges of daylight gone, and he was falling rapidly in an evening
twilight through a whirl of fine snowflakes that streamed past him
towards the zenith, that drifted in upon the things about him and
melted, that touched his face with ghostly fingers. He shivered. His
breath came smoki