ure from the earth was arranged to occur precisely at
midnight. The moon near the full was hanging high over head, and a
marvelous spectacle was presented to the eyes of those below as the
great squadron of floating ships, with their insignia 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.

Instantly magnificent fireworks were displayed in honor of our
departure. Rockets by hundreds of thousands shot heaven-ward, and then
burst in constellations of firey 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 now, as we slowly rose higher, a marvelous 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 center 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 center 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 that all pervading sunshine. Then the great planet
beneath us hung unspeakable in its beauty. The outlines of several of
the co