Towards evening, we went abroad again to post some letters.  It was cool and pleasant; the long village was quite empty, except for one or two urchins who followed us as they might have followed a menagerie; the hills and the tree-tops looked in from all sides through the clear air; and the bells were chiming for yet another service.

Suddenly we sighted the three girls standing, with a fourth sister, in front of a shop on the wide selvage of the roadway.  We had been very merry with them a little while ago, to be sure.  But what was the etiquette of Origny?  Had it been a country road, of course we should have spoken to them; but here, under the eyes of all the gossips, ought we to do even as much as bow?  I consulted the Cigarette.

‘Look,’ said he.

I looked.  There were the four girls on the same spot; but now four backs were turned to us, very upright and conscious.  Corporal Modesty had given the word of command, and the well-disciplined picket had gone right-about-face like a single person.  They maintained this formation all the while we were in sight; but we heard them tittering among themselves, and the girl whom we had not met laughed with open mouth, and even looked over her shoulder at the enemy.  I wonder was it altogether modesty after all? or in part a sort of country provocation?

As we were returning to the inn, we beheld something floating in the ample field of golden evening sky, above the chalk cliffs and the trees that grow along their summit.  It was too high up, too large, and too steady for a kite; and as it was dark, it could not be a star.  For although a star were as black as ink and as rugged as a walnut, so amply does the sun bathe heaven with radiance, that it would sparkle like a point of light for us.  The village was dotted with people with their heads in air; and the children were in a bustle all along the street and far up the straight road that climbs the hill, where we could still see them running in loose knots.  It was a balloon, we learned, which had left Saint Quentin at half-past five that evening.  Mighty composedly the majority of the grown people took it.  But we were English, and were soon running up the hill with the best.  Being travellers ourselves in a small way, we would fain have seen these other travellers alight.

The spectacle was over by the time we gained the top of the hill.  All the gold had withered out of the sky, and the balloon had disappeared.  Whither?  I ask myself; caught up into the seventh heaven? or come safely to land somewhere in that blue uneven distance, into which the roadway dipped and melted before our eyes?  Probably the aeronauts were already warming themselves at a farm chimney, for they say it is cold in these unhomely regions of the air.  The night fell swiftly.  Roadside trees and disappointed sightseers, returning through the meadows, stood out in black against a margin of low red sunset.  It was cheerfuller to face the other way, and so down the hill we went, with a full moon, the colour of a melon, swinging high above the wooded valley, and the white cliffs behind us faintly reddened by the fire of the chalk kilns.