e was no
help for it. So we took our seats in the basket, said good-by, and were
off.

Now we went up! _up!_ UP! passing through a thin cloud that made
everything below look dim and distant. We were in the region where
_November spends the summer_. Whew! how chilly it was. We wrapped our
overcoats and blankets close about us and our teeth chattered. Then we
rubbed our hands and faces. Why! how queerly they looked and felt.

"Ha! ha! look at the Professor's face. Why! there _ain't a wrinkle
left_!" said the photographer.

And so it proved. The aneroid told us that we were over three miles from
the ground, and the atmosphere was so diminished in pressure that the
internal forces of the body pressed outward and made the skin full and
smooth.

One of yesterday's party had provided some large envelopes with long red
tails of tissue paper to drop into towns, and we wrote messages and
enclosed them in some of these, putting sand in one end, and launched
them. We watched them as they shot hither and yon in their swift flight
toward the earth. The chance finder was requested to send the contents to
the nearest telegraph office, but we never heard from any of them, save
one.

About noon we found by comparing our maps with the streams below that we
had passed into Pennsylvania; and not long afterwards we descried Oil
City set upon the creek, with all its hills covered with derricks and oil
tanks.

Speaking of Oil City, reminds me of a rather funny incident: For a couple
of years I had been in correspondence with a young man who resided there,
and who was also a journalist. His name and mine were just the same. I
had promised faithfully to stop and see him at any time chance might
bring me near his home. I took one of the envelopes and wrote a _regret_,
dropping it over the city. It was picked up in the road and handed to
him, but he always insisted that I had broken my promise unreasonably.

At the rate in which Oil City was left behind we knew our pace was very
rapid, though to us it all seemed like a dead calm, for we kept just even
with the wind.

The Professor said we could reach New England by midnight if the wind
held and it didn't grow cloudy; but alas! for the past hour we had been
watching a little fleecy nebulous bit of mist that seemed, like a spirit,
to spring from the nothingness of the blue ether, growing constantly, and
attracting other cloudlets which came toward it from all quarters of the
heavens and w