k' ye to witness, Mr. Byfield!"

"Then in a minute or so I will do myself the pleasure of construing,"
said I, and turned to scan the earth we were leaving--I had not guessed
how rapidly.

We contemplated it from the height of six hundred feet--or so Byfield
asserted after consulting his barometer. He added that this was a mere
nothing: the wonder was the balloon had risen at all with one-half of
the total folly of Edinburgh clinging to the car. I passed the possible
inaccuracy and certain ill-temper of this calculation. He had (he
explained) made jettison of at least a hundred-weight of sand ballast. I
could only hope it had fallen on my cousin. To me, six hundred feet
appeared a very respectable eminence. And the view was ravishing.

The _Lunardi_, mounting through a stagnant calm in a line almost
vertical, had pierced the morning mists, and now swam emancipated in a
heaven of exquisite blue. Below us, by some trick of eyesight, the
country had grown concave, its horizons curving up like the rim of a
shallow bowl--a bowl heaped, in point of fact, with sea-fog, but to our
eyes with a froth delicate and dazzling as a whipped syllabub of snow.
Upon it the travelling shadow of the balloon became no shadow but a
stain: an amethyst (you might call it) purged of all grosser properties
than colour and lucency. At times thrilled by no perceptible wind,
rather by the pulse of the sun's rays, the froth shook and parted: and
then behold, deep in the _crevasses_, vignetted and shining, an acre or
two of the earth of man's business and fret--tilled slopes of the
Lothians, ships dotted on the Forth, the capital like a hive that some
child had smoked--the ear of fancy could almost hear it buzzing.

I snatched the glass from Byfield, and brought it to focus upon one of
these peepshow rifts: and lo! at the foot of the shaft, imaged, as it
were, far down in a luminous well, a green hillside and three figures
standing. A white speck fluttered; and fluttered until the rift closed
again. Flora's handkerchief! Blessings on the brave hand that waved
it!--at a moment when (as I have since heard and knew without need of
hearing) her heart was down in her shoes, or, to speak accurately, in
the milkmaid Janet's. Singular in many things, she was at one with the
rest of her sex in its native and incurable distrust of man's
inventions.

I am bound to say that my own faith in aerostatics was a plant--a
sensitive plant--of extremely tender growt