mine. Now he was looking up toward us, shouting out his words, with his
hands funneled about his mouth for a speaking trumpet. And at every word
he uttered he shrank into himself, growing shorter and shorter.

It was not that we seemed to be moving. We seemed to be standing
perfectly still, without any motion of any sort except a tiny teetering
motion of the hamper-basket, while the earth and what was on it fell
rapidly away from beneath us. At once all sense of perspective became
distorted.

When on the roof of a tall building this distortion had never seemed to
me so great. I imagine this is because the building remains stationary
and a balloon moves. Almost directly below us was one of our party,
wearing a soft hat with a flattish brim. It appeared to me that almost
instantly his shoulders and body and legs vanished. Nothing remained of
him but his hat, which looked exactly like a thumb tack driven into a
slightly tilted drawing board, the tilted drawing board being the field.
The field seemed sloped now, instead of flat.

Across the sunken road was another field. Its owner, I presume, had
started to turn it up for fall planting, when the armies came along and
chased him away; so there remained a wide plowed strip, and on each side
of it a narrower strip of unplowed earth. Even as I peered downward at
it, this field was transformed into a width of brown corduroy trimmed
with green velvet.

For a rudder we carried a long, flapping clothesline arrangement, like
the tail of a kite, to the lower end of which were threaded seven
yellow-silk devices suggesting inverted sunshades without handles.
These things must have been spaced on the tail at equal distances apart,