want to bag us.

Ford and Austin were assigned as the lookout from 12.00 to 2.00, Lyons
and myself from 2.00 to 3.00, and Donaldson and MacKeever from 3.00 to
4.00.

From midnight till 3.00 a.m. Donaldson slept as peaceful as a baby,
curled up in the basket with a sandbag for a pillow. The rest of us
slept little through the night and talked less, each absorbed in the
reflections and speculations inspired by our novel experience.

At the approach of dawn we had the most unique and extraordinary
experience ever given to man. The balloon was sailing low in a deep
valley. To the east of us the Berkshires rose steeply to summits
probably fifteen hundred feet above us. Beneath us a little village
lay, snuggled cosily between two small meeting brooks, all dim under
the mists of early morning and the shadows of the hills. No flush of
dawn yet lit the sky. Donaldson had been consulting his watch,
suddenly he rose and called, pointing eastward across the range:

"Watch, boys! Look there!"

He then quickly dumped overboard half the contents of a ballast bag.
Flying upward like an arrow, the balloon soon shot up above the
mountain-top, when, lo! a miracle. The phenomenon of sunrise was
reversed! We our very selves instead had risen on the sun! There he
stood, full and round, peeping at us through the trees crowning a
distant Berkshire hill, as if startled by our temerity.

Shortly thereafter, when we had descended to our usual level and were
running swiftly before a stiff breeze over a rocky hillside, Donaldson
yelled:

"Hang on, boys, for your lives!"

The end of the drag rope had gotten a hitch about a large tree limb.
Luckily Donaldson had seen it in time to warn us, else we had there
finished our careers. We had barely time to seize the stays when the
rope tautened with a shock that nearly turned the basket upside down,
spilled out our water-bucket and some ballast, left MacKeever and
myself hanging in space by our hands, and the other four on the lower
side of the basket, scrambling to save themselves. Instantly, of
course, the basket righted and dropped back beneath us.

And then began a terrible struggle.

The pressure of the wind bore us down within a hundred feet of the
ragged rocks. Groaning under the strain, the rope seemed ready to
snap. Like a huge leviathan trapped in a net, the gas-bag writhed,
twisted, bulged, shrank, gathered into a ball and sprang fiercely out.
The loose folds of canva