ea we are going inland. In half an
hour we'll be at Canterbury."

"I have heard Canterbury's a very nice old town," said Josiah. "It
wouldn't be a bad place to stop at; and if the wind's contrary to-day,
it might be right to-morrow."

The captain said nothing, and Josiah, looking up to see what effect his
suggestion might have, noticed for the first time that on a face usually
smiling there were possibilities of a fixed hard look which it evidently
didn't beseem him to trifle with.

The balloon slowly rose till the aneroid marked a height of 1,500 feet
and still the current drove it steadily north-west. Looking southward,
Josiah beheld a sight which, if it were the last he was ever to look
upon, was at least a glorious glimpse of earth, and sky, and sea. There
lay the Channel gleaming in the sun, a broad belt of silver. Beyond it,
like a cloud, was France. Dover had vanished even to the crest of the
castle on the hill. But Josiah knew where it was by the mist that lay
over it and shone white in the rays of the sun. Save for this patch of
mist, which seemed to drift with the voyagers far below the car, there
was nothing to obscure the range of vision. Josiah could not at any time
make out forms of people. The white highways that ran like threads among
the fields, and the tiny openings in the towns and villages which he
guessed were streets, seemed to belong to a dead world, for nowhere was
there trace of living person. The strange stillness that brooded over
the earth was made more uncanny by cries that occasionally seemed to
float in the air around them, behind, before, to the right or to the
left, but never exactly beneath the car. They could hear people calling,
and the captain said that they were running after the balloon and
cheering. But Josiah could distinguish no moving thing. Yes; once he saw
some pheasants running across a field below and pointed them out to the
captain. The captain laughed, a strange resonant laugh it seemed in this
upper stillness, and said they were "a lot of chestnut horses capering
about in the field." A flock of sheep in another field huddled together,
looked like a heap of limestone chippings. As for the fields, stretched
out in illimitable extent, far as the eye could reach, they seemed to
form a gigantic carpet, with patterns chiefly diamond-shaped, and in
colour shaded from bright emerald to russet brown.

"This won't do," the captain said again, and seizing a bag of ballast
he em