attice-work of steel slats, to form a sort of false floor over the
port-hole. This was full of diamond-shaped openings between the slats,
so that the view out of the rear window was not obstructed. Then he did
the same to form a false floor for his compartment. Finally he said to
me,--

"Now, if you are all ready, I will stand her on end;" and by applying
the currents to the forward end only he caused her to rise slowly until
she stood upright. The cupboard in my compartment and the desk in his
end were each hung upon a central bolt, and they righted themselves as
the projectile stood up, so that nothing in them was disarranged. I was
sitting on the lower hinge of my bed, clutching tightly and watching
everything, when the doctor called to me to turn the little wheel which
operated a screw and served to push out the rudder.

"But the whole weight of the projectile is now on the rudder," I
objected.

"You will have to make over all your ideas of weight," he said, with
some impatience. "Run the rudder out. The gauge shows an ounce of
buoyancy, which is nearly enough to counteract all the dead weight we
have. You can lift the rest with the rudder-screw."

And, true enough, it was perfectly easy to whirl the little wheel around
which made the rudder creep out. There was a steering wheel in the
doctor's compartment and one in my own. He set it exactly amidships, and
told me to prepare for the ascent. I turned out the gas in my
compartment and crouched nervously over the port-hole window to watch
the panorama of Earth fade away.

"Here go two batteries!" he cried. I held on frantically, expecting that
we would leap into the heavens in one grand bound, as I had seen the
model do. But we began to rise very slowly, a foot and a half the first
second, three feet the next, and so on, as the doctor told me
afterwards. It was all so slow and quiet that I was suddenly possessed
with a fear that after all the projectile was a failure. Had a balloon
started so slowly, it would never have risen far. This fear held me for
only a minute, for when I looked down again, the landscape below was
beginning to look like a dim map or a picture, instead of the reality.
The doctor was steering to the northward, directly over the lake. I
could see its great purple, restful surface below me, but more plainly
could I discern the outline where its silvery edge bathed the white
sands of the shore. Following this outline I could see a web of
railro