it; and somebody else--a stranger to me--
suggested that perhaps I was too heavy for a passenger.

By that time, however, a kindly corporal had boosted me up over the rim
of the basket and helped me to squeeze through the thick netting of guy
lines; and there I was, standing inside that overgrown clotheshamper,
which came up breast high on me--and Brinkner und Meiningen was swinging
himself nimbly in beside me. That basket was meant to hold but one man.
It made a wondrously snug fit for two; the both of us being full-sized
adults at that. We stood back to back; and to address the other each
must needs speak over his shoulder. The canvas saddle was between us,
dangling against the calves of our legs; and the telephone was in front
of the lieutenant, where he could reach the transmitter with his lips by
stooping a little.

The soldiers began unhooking the sandbags; the sergeant who guarded the
telephone wire took up a strand of it and held it loosely in his hands,
ready to pay it out. Under me I felt the basket heave gently. Looking
up I saw that the balloon was no longer a crooked sausage. She had
become a big, soft, yellow summer squash, with an attenuated neck. The
flaccid abdomen flinched in and puffed out, and the snout wabbled to and
fro.

The lieutenant began telling me things in badly broken but painstaking
English--such things, for example, as that the baglike protuberance just
above our heads, at the bottom end of the envelope, contained air,
which, being heavier than gas, served as a balance to hold her head up
in the wind and keep her from folding in on herself; also, that it was
his duty to remain aloft, at the end of his tether, as long as he could,
meantime studying the effect of the German shell-fire on the enemy's
position and telephoning down instructions for the better aiming of the
guns--a job wherein the aeroplane scouts ably reenforced him, since they
could range at will, whereas his position was comparatively fixed and
stationary.

Also I remember his saying, with a tinge of polite regret in his tone,
that he was sorry I had not put on a uniform overcoat with shoulder
straps on it, before boarding the car; because, as he took pains to
explain, in the event of our cable parting and of our drifting over the
Allies' lines and then descending, he might possibly escape, but I
should most likely be shot on the spot as a spy before I had a chance to
explain. "However," he added consolingly, "th