ke you clear."

This was a cheerful thing to start with. Josiah had pictured all kinds
of horrors, ending with the certainty of dropping into the sea. That
they should begin with a stack of chimneys was an unexpected
aggravation. Still, it might be better to get it over at once. At least,
he would fall on land, and the fragments picked up would receive
Christian burial.

He got in and sat in the bottom of the car. It was, he noticed,
something like one of the coracles of which he had made mention in the
preface to "Underground England." There was something good in that. The
Romans made long journeys In the coracle. If the worst came to the
worst, they might float.

Even in the anguish of his mind, he couldn't help wondering when Captain
Mulberry would finish coming in. He had never before noticed how tall he
was, till he found the necessity of getting out of the way of his legs
as he crept between the ropes into the car.

"Let go all!" cried the captain, and Josiah felt his last hour had come.
He held his breath and stuck to his hat, being under the impression that
the whole affair would shoot up into the air like a rocket. He expected
to be deafened by the noise of whizzing through the air, and to be half
suffocated with the rush of wind. Looking over to get a last look at the
nature of the soil on which he would presently fall, Josiah beheld a
strange sight. As far as he knew, the balloon was motionless, while the
earth was dropping rapidly from under them as if the laws of gravitation
were irrevocably broken and the world was falling through space.

"Done it!" he heard the captain cry in a voice that sounded curiously
remote.

"Done what?" said Josiah, anxiously looking up.

"Why, the chimney-stack. Just cleared it by half a foot. I didn't like
to say much about it, but it was a pretty near touch-and-go affair.
That's the worst of filling a balloon. You must do it near a gasworks,
and there's sure to be a stack of chimneys at hand."

It seemed but a moment since Josiah had heard the captain call out "Let
go all," and there they were in space a thousand feet above the level of
the land, sailing calmly along in bright warm sunlight, and with no more
motion perceptible than if they were still sitting in the room in King
Street--that cherished apartment which Josiah felt his eye would never
light on more.

"This won't do," said the captain sternly; "we've got in the wrong
current, and instead of going out to s