hour. At six o'clock Lake Umbagog was
floating beneath our adventurers, and before they realized their
danger--so deceptive are time and space when reckoned from
balloons--night surprised them in the great Maine wilderness. The
alternative was between a descent in a trackless forest a hundred miles
from human habitation, with scant provisions and no firearms or
fishing-tackle, and an all-night voyage, trusting to luck and their
ballast for getting beyond the wilderness. They had taken chances
together before, and they went on now. If they failed to get out of the
woods, they could tear up the balloon, and, encasing the wicker-basket
with the waterproof material, float down some favoring stream. On and on
for hours in an unknown direction, over an unknown region, winged by the
wind and ally of the storm, they went, until, in the dismal watches of
the early morning, to darkness, uncertainty and the intensity of
isolation a new horror was added. The murmur of plashing forest-streams,
which had hitherto been the only sound greeting them from the nether
gloom, now gave place to the measured roll of the surf, and this, in
turn, to complete silence. They were drifting out to sea, and were
already far beyond the shore! The valve was opened at once, and as the
balloon slowly settled into a dense, chilly fog the occupants of the
basket momentarily expected a plunge-bath. The drag-rope, however,
behaved with distinguished consideration, holding them a few feet above
the waves, through which it whisked at a terrific rate. The weary and
anxious watchers were thus kept in suspense for nearly half an hour,
when suddenly there broke through the fog ahead the welcome outlines of
a forest-shore, and in a moment more the drag-rope had lifted them above
the tree-tops. By five o'clock it became light enough to note the time
and that they were travelling in a south-westerly direction exactly
contrary to their course of the evening before. At seven o'clock the
balloon was moored to a limb, and its passengers, climbing down the
drag-rope, made their way to a railroad-cutting which they had noticed
while aloft. It proved to be on the line of the Intercolonial Railway in
the county of Rimouski, Lower Canada, three hundred miles below Quebec.
They had been dancing along the southern border of the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, and, had they not descended from the upper current into the
water, were in a fair way to have next sighted land somewhere on the
co