“Hurrah!” cried the captain, “we’re off now.”

Nearer and nearer came the belt of silver which seemed to girdle continent and island.  They were close to Dover, and could make out the town.  Josiah, knowing well the irregular plan on which the streets are laid out, was struck by the manner in which, as looked down upon from this height, they formed themselves into beautifully defined curves, straight lines, and other highly respectable geometrical shapes.  They saw the castle and the pier with what seemed to be ants crawling on it.  A little patch of colour, that to Josiah looked like a ball of scarlet worsted, was, the captain said, a sentry on duty.

“There’s Shakespeare’s Cliff,” said the captain.  “The Earl of Gloucester should be with us now:—­

                                How fearful
   And dizzy ’tis, to cast one’s eyes so low! 
   The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
   Show scarce so gross as beetles; half-way down
   Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade! 
   Methinks he seems no bigger than his head: 
   The fishermen that walk upon the beach
   Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,
   Diminish’d to her cock; her cock, a buoy
   Almost too small for sight.”

“I’ll look no more,” said Josiah, who also knew his Shakespeare.

   “Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
   Topple down headlong.”

It was passing strange and at first dreadful, this intense silence and this strangeness of the familiar earth.  But after a while everything like terror passed away from Josiah’s mind.  He began to feel the fascination of the thing.  His spirits rose as he breathed the delicious air, and when the captain said, “We are over the water now,” and Josiah looking down discerned the sea gleaming below, he could have clapped his hands for joy.

“This is splendid,” said the captain.  “We’ll be across in half an hour.  We’ll catch the train for Paris, and you shall dance at the Closerie to-night.”

Josiah didn’t dance, and didn’t know what the Closerie might be.  But he was not without susceptibility to the allurement of a quiet dinner in Paris, and began to feel the exhilaration of having accomplished a perilous feat, to which he would certainly drag in some reference in his great work.  It would be difficult, as he was as far as possible remote from Underground England.  But it might be worked in some antithetical sentence.

After they had sailed for the space of ten minutes the captain, who had been throwing out bits of paper which they left far behind, suddenly said a bad word.

“We are becalmed,” he continued, and truly the bits of paper flung out floated idly round the balloon.  “We must get out of this.”

He cast out the ballast, bag after bag, and higher still they soared.  Nevertheless, whenever they flung out the bits of paper, they floated here and there, some dropping back into the car.