that it was
there, and to assure myself that we were within the blessed range of its
influence, and not gone adrift into the timelessness of eternity.

I had been doing this for the twentieth or thirtieth time, and had fallen
into a light sleep: I dreamed wildly of a journey in an express train,
and of arriving at a railway station where the air was full of the sound
of locomotive engines blowing off steam with a horrible and tremendous
hissing; I woke frightened and uneasy, but the hissing and crashing
noises pursued me now that I was awake, and forced me to own that they
were real. What they were I knew not, but they grew gradually fainter
and fainter, and after a time were lost. In a few hours the clouds
broke, and I saw beneath me that which made the chilled blood run colder
in my veins. I saw the sea, and nothing but the sea; in the main black,
but flecked with white heads of storm-tossed, angry waves.

Arowhena was sleeping quietly at the bottom of the car, and as I looked
at her sweet and saintly beauty, I groaned, and cursed myself for the
misery into which I had brought her; but there was nothing for it now.

I sat and waited for the worst, and presently I saw signs as though that
worst were soon to be at hand, for the balloon had begun to sink. On
first seeing the sea I had been impressed with the idea that we must have
been falling, but now there could be no mistake, we were sinking, and
that fast. I threw out a bag of ballast, and for a time we rose again,
but in the course of a few hours the sinking recommenced, and I threw out
another bag.

Then the battle commenced in earnest. It lasted all that afternoon and
through the night until the following evening. I had seen never a sail
nor a sign of a sail, though I had half blinded myself with straining my
eyes incessantly in every direction; we had parted with everything but
the clothes which we had upon our backs; food and water were gone, all
thrown out to the wheeling albatrosses, in order to save us a few hours
or even minutes from the sea. I did not throw away the books till we
were within a few feet of the water, and clung to my manuscripts to the
very last. Hope there seemed none whatever--yet, strangely enough we
were neither of us utterly hopeless, and even when the evil that we
dreaded was upon us, and that which we greatly feared had come, we sat in
the car of the balloon with the waters up to our middle, and still smiled
with a ghastly