ggesting inverted sunshades without handles.
These things must have been spaced on the tail at equal distances apart,
but as they rose from the earth and followed after us, whipping in the
wind, the uppermost one became a big umbrella turned inside out; the
second was half of a pumpkin; the third was a yellow soup plate; the
fourth was a poppy bloom; and the remaining three were just amber beads
of diminishing sizes.

Probably it took longer, but if you asked me I should say that not more
than two or three minutes had passed before the earth stopped slipping
away and we fetched up with a profound and disconcerting jerk. The
balloon had reached the tip of her hitch line.

She rocked and twisted and bent half double in the pangs of a fearful
tummy-ache, and at every paroxysm the car lurched in sympathy, only to
be brought up short by the pull of the taut cable; so that we two,
wedged in together as we were, nevertheless jostled each other
violently. I am a poor sailor, both by instinct and training. By
rights and by precedents I should have been violently ill on the
instant; but I did not have time to be ill.

My fellow traveler all this while was pointing out this thing and that
to me--showing how the telephone operated; how his field glasses poised
just before his eyes, being swung and balanced on a delicately adjusted
suspended pivot; telling me how on a perfectly clear day--this October
day was slightly hazy--we could see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the
Cathedral at Rheims; gyrating his hands to explain the manner in which
the horses, trotting away from us as we climbed upward, had given to the
drum on the wagon a reverse motion, so that the cable was payed out
evenly and regularly. But I am afraid I did not listen closely. My
eyes were so busy that my ears loafed on the job.

For once in my life--and doubtlessly only once--I saw now
understandingly a battle front.

It was spread before me--lines and dots and dashes on a big green and
brown and yellow map. Why, the whole thing was as plain as a chart. I
had a reserved seat for the biggest show on earth.

To be sure it was a gallery seat, for the terrace from which we started
stood fully five hundred feet above the bottom of the valley, and we had
ascended approximately seven hundred feet above that, giving us an
altitude of, say, twelve hundred feet in all above the level of the
river; but a gallery seat suited me. It suited me perfectly. The great