ose are possibilities most
remote. The rope is not likely to break; and if it did we both should
probably be dead before we ever reached the earth."

That last statement sank deep into my consciousness; but I fear I did
not hearken so attentively as I ought to the continuation of the
lieutenant's conversation, because, right in the middle of his remarks,
something had begun to happen.

An officer had stepped up alongside to tell me that very shortly I
should undoubtedly be quite seasick--or, rather, skysick--because of the
pitching about of the basket when the balloon reached the end of the
cable; and I was trying to listen to him with one ear and to my
prospective traveling companion with the other when I suddenly realized
that the officer's face was no longer on a level with mine. It was
several feet below mine. No; it was not--it was several yards below
mine. Now he was looking up toward us, shouting out his words, with his
hands funneled about his mouth for a speaking trumpet. And at every word
he uttered he shrank into himself, growing shorter and shorter.

It was not that we seemed to be moving. We seemed to be standing
perfectly still, without any motion of any sort except a tiny teetering
motion of the hamper-basket, while the earth and what was on it fell
rapidly away from beneath us. At once all sense of perspective became
distorted.

When on the roof of a tall building this distortion had never seemed to
me so great. I imagine this is because the building remains stationary
and a balloon moves. Almost directly below us was one of our party,
wearing a soft hat with a flattish brim. It appeared to me that almost
instantly his shoulders and body and legs vanished. Nothing remained of
him but his hat, which looked exactly like a thumb tack driven into a
slightly tilted drawing board, the tilted drawing board being the field.
The field seemed sloped now, instead of flat.

Across the sunken road was another field. Its owner, I presume, had
started to turn it up for fall planting, when the armies came along and
chased him away; so there remained a wide plowed strip, and on each side
of it a narrower strip of unplowed earth. Even as I peered downward at
it, this field was transformed into a width of brown corduroy trimmed
with green velvet.

For a rudder we carried a long, flapping clothesline arrangement, like
the tail of a kite, to the lower end of which were threaded seven
yellow-silk devices su