their signal lights ablaze,
cast loose and began slowly to move away on their adventurous and
unprecedented expedition into the great unknown. A tremendous cheer,
billowing up from the throats of millions of excited men and women,
seemed to rend the curtain of the night, and made the airships tremble
with the atmospheric vibrations that were set in motion.

Magnificent Fireworks.

Instantly magnificent fireworks were displayed in honor of our
departure. Rockets by hundreds of thousands shot heaven-ward, and then
burst in constellations of fiery drops. The sudden illumination thus
produced, overspreading hundreds of square miles of the surface of the
earth with a light almost like that of day, must certainly have been
visible to the inhabitants of Mars, if they were watching us at the
time. They might, or might not, correctly interpret its significance;
but, at any rate, we did not care. We were off, and were confident that
we could meet our enemy on his own ground before he could attack us again.

And the Earth Was Like a Globe.

And now, as we slowly rose higher, a marvellous scene was disclosed. At
first the earth beneath us, buried as it was in night, resembled
the hollow of a vast cup of ebony blackness, in the centre of which,
like the molten lava run together at the bottom of a volcanic crater,
shone the light of the illuminations around New York. But when we got
beyond the atmosphere, and the earth still continued to recede below us,
its aspect changed. The cup-shaped appearance was gone, and it began to
round out beneath our eyes in the form of a vast globe--an enormous ball
mysteriously suspended under us, glimmering over most of its surface,
with the faint illumination of the moon, and showing toward its eastern
edge the oncoming light of the rising sun.

When we were still further away, having slightly varied our course so
that the sun was once more entirely hidden behind the centre of the
earth, we saw its atmosphere completely illuminated, all around it,
with prismatic lights, like a gigantic rainbow in the form of a ring.

Another shift in our course rapidly carried us out of the shadow of
the earth and into the all pervading sunshine. Then the great planet
beneath us hung unspeakable in its beauty. The outlines of several of
the continents were clearly discernible on its surface, streaked and
spotted with delicate shades of varying color, and the sunlight flashed
and glowed in long lanes across