OUR BALLOON CAMP.
choice fell upon a photographer, and the writer.
We were sorry indeed to leave our companions behind us, but there was no help for it. So we took our seats in the basket, said good-by, and were off.
Now we went up! up! UP! passing through a thin cloud that made everything below look dim and distant. We were in the region where November spends the summer. Whew! how chilly it was. We wrapped our overcoats and blankets close about us and our teeth chattered. Then we rubbed our hands and faces. Why! how queerly they looked and felt.
“Ha! ha! look at the Professor’s face. Why! there ain’t a wrinkle left!” said the photographer.
And so it proved. The aneroid told us that we were over three miles from the ground, and the atmosphere was so diminished in pressure that the internal forces of the body pressed outward and made the skin full and smooth.
One of yesterday’s party had provided some large envelopes with long red tails of tissue paper to drop into towns, and we wrote messages and enclosed them in some of these, putting sand in one end, and launched them. We watched them as they shot hither and yon in their swift flight toward the earth. The chance finder was requested to send the contents to the nearest telegraph office, but we never heard from any of them, save one.