“I’m going up in it some day,” said Dick, confidently.  “Colonel Newcomb has promised me that he will take me with him when his turn for the ascension comes.”

The chance was a week in coming, a tremendously long time it seemed to Dick, but it came at last.  He climbed into the basket with Colonel Newcomb, two generals, and the aeronauts and sat very quiet in a corner.  He felt an extraordinary thrill when the ropes were allowed to slide and the balloon was slowly going almost straight upward.  The sensation was somewhat similar to that which shook him when he went into battle at Bull Run, but pride came to his rescue and he soon forgot the physical tremor to watch the world that now rolled beneath them, a world that they seemed to have left, although the ropes always held.

Dick’s gaze instinctively turned southward, where he knew the Confederate army lay.  A vast and beautiful panorama spread in a semi-circle before him.  The green of summer, the green that had been stained so fearfully at Bull Run, was gone.  The grass was now brown from the great heats and the promise of autumn soon to come, but—­from the height at least—­it was a soft and mellow brown, and the dust was gone.

The hills rolled far away southward, and under the horizon’s rim.  Narrow ribbons of silver here and there were the numerous brooks and creeks that cut the country.  Groves, still heavy and dark with foliage, hung on the hills, or filled some valley, like green in a bowl.  Now and then, among clumps of trees, colonial houses with their pillared porticoes appeared.

It was a rare and beautiful scene, appealing with great force to Dick.  There was nothing to tell of war save the Northern forces just beneath them, and he would not look down.  But he did look back, and saw the broad band of the Potomac, and beyond it the white dome of the Capitol and the roof of Washington.  But his gaze turned again to the South, where his absorbing interest lay, and once more he viewed the quiet country, rolling away until it touched the horizon rim.  The afternoon was growing late, and great terraces of red and gold were heaping above one another in the sky until they reached the zenith.

“Try the glasses for a moment, Dick,” said Colonel Newcomb, as he passed them to the boy.

Dick swept them across the South in a great semi-circle, and now new objects rose upon the surface of the earth.  He saw distinctly the long chain of the Blue Ridge rising on the west, then blurring in the distance into a solid black rampart.  In the south he saw a long curving line of rising blue plumes.  It did not need Colonel Newcomb to tell him that these were the campfires of the army that they had met on the field of Bull Run, and that the Southern troops were now cooking their suppers.

No doubt his cousin Harry was there and perhaps others whom he knew.  The fires seemed to Dick a defiance to the Union.  Well, in view of their victory, the defiance was justified, and those fires might come nearer yet.  Dick, catching the tone of older men who shared his views, had not believed at first that the rebellion would last long, but his opinion was changing fast, and the talk of wise Sergeant Whitley was helping much in that change.