ground. The index hands of both dials were travelling backwards towards
zero along their respective graduated arcs; and simultaneously with the
registration by the pressure gauge of a pressure of six pounds--which
indicated the air-pressure in the air-chambers of the ship--the other
dial registered zero, thus indicating that the partial exhaustion of the
air in the air-chambers had rendered the ship so buoyant that she was
now deprived of weight and was upon the point of floating upward,
balloon-like, in the air. Another moment, and the incredible was
happening; the ship had become converted into a gigantic metallic
balloon, and the professor, extinguishing the electric light which
illuminated the interior of the pilot-house, peered out through one of
the circular ports in the walls of the structure, to see by the
starlight that the _Flying Fish_ had already left the earth, and, in the
still air, was rising in a perfectly horizontal position past the tops
of the trees in the park.

"Good!" muttered the lonely scientist to himself. "Everything works
just as sweetly as it did that night, six years ago, when we backed out
of the building-shed on the banks of the Thames, and started upon our
first memorable journey!"

He reversed the great wheel controlling the valve which admitted the
vapour that drove the air out of the air-chambers of the great ship,
thus creating a vacuum there by the subsequent and almost instant
condensation of the vapour, and, softly made his way out on deck where,
walking to the rail, he looked forth upon the landscape that was dimly
widening out beneath him as the _Flying Fish_ continued to float gently
upward.

It was a beautifully fine, clear, starlit night, without the faintest
suspicion of a cloud anywhere in the soft, velvety blue-black dome of
the sky; and presently, when the professor's eyes had grown accustomed
to the dim, mysterious radiance of the twinkling constellations, he was
able to see the landscape steadily unfolding around him like a map, in a
rapidly widening circle, as the great ship steadily attained an
ever-increasing altitude in the breathless atmosphere. For some ten
minutes the scientist remained thoughtfully leaning upon the rail,
watching the noble expanse of park beneath him dwindle into a mere dark,
insignificant blot upon the face of the country, dotted here and there
with feebly twinkling lights, until the sleeping waters of the Channel
came into view to the