ick, "and we'll have to try all the
harder to keep them from being a failure. Look, there goes our balloon!"

Every day, usually late in the afternoon, a captive balloon rose from
the Northern camp, and officers with powerful glasses inspected the
Southern position, watching for an advance or a new movement of any
kind.

"I'm going up in it some day," said Dick, confidently. "Colonel Newcomb
has promised me that he will take me with him when his turn for the
ascension comes."

The chance was a week in coming, a tremendously long time it seemed
to Dick, but it came at last. He climbed into the basket with Colonel
Newcomb, two generals, and the aeronauts and sat very quiet in a corner.
He felt an extraordinary thrill when the ropes were allowed to slide and
the balloon was slowly going almost straight upward. The sensation was
somewhat similar to that which shook him when he went into battle at
Bull Run, but pride came to his rescue and he soon forgot the physical
tremor to watch the world that now rolled beneath them, a world that
they seemed to have left, although the ropes always held.

Dick's gaze instinctively turned southward, where he knew the
Confederate army lay. A vast and beautiful panorama spread in a
semi-circle before him. The green of summer, the green that had been
stained so fearfully at Bull Run, was gone. The grass was now brown from
the great heats and the promise of autumn soon to come, but--from the
height at least--it was a soft and mellow brown, and the dust was gone.

The hills rolled far away southward, and under the horizon's rim. Narrow
ribbons of silver here and there were the numerous brooks and creeks
that cut the country. Groves, still heavy and dark with foliage, hung
on the hills, or filled some valley, like green in a bowl. Now and then,
among clumps of trees, colonial houses with their pillared porticoes
appeared.

It was a rare and beautiful scene, appealing with great force to Dick.
There was nothing to tell of war save the Northern forces just beneath
them, and he would not look down. But he did look back, and saw the
broad band of the Potomac, and beyond it the white dome of the Capitol
and the roof of Washington. But his gaze turned again to the South,
where his absorbing interest lay, and once more he viewed the quiet
country, rolling away until it touched the horizon rim. The afternoon
was growing late, and great terraces of red and gold were heaping above
one another in t