Now we went up! _up!_ UP! passing through a thin cloud that made everything below look dim and distant. We were in the region where _November spends the summer_. Whew! how chilly it was. We wrapped our overcoats and blankets close about us and our teeth chattered. Then we rubbed our hands and faces. Why! how queerly they looked and felt. "Ha! ha! look at the Professor's face. Why! there _ain't a wrinkle left_!" said the photographer. And so it proved. The aneroid told us that we were over three miles from the ground, and the atmosphere was so diminished in pressure that the internal forces of the body pressed outward and made the skin full and smooth. One of yesterday's party had provided some large envelopes with long red tails of tissue paper to drop into towns, and we wrote messages and enclosed them in some of these, putting sand in one end, and launched them. We watched them as they shot hither and yon in their swift flight toward the earth. The chance finder was requested to send the contents to the nearest telegraph office, but we never heard from any of them, save one. About noon we found by comparing our maps with the streams below that we had passed into Pennsylvania; and not long afterwards we descried Oil City set upon the creek, with all its hills covered with derricks and oil tanks. Speaking of Oil City, reminds me of a rather funny incident: For a couple of years I had been in correspondence with a young man who resided there, and who was also a journalist. His name and mine were just the same. I had promised faithfully to stop and see him at any time chance might bring me near his home. I took one of the envelopes and wrote a _regret_, dropping it over the city. It was picked up in the road and handed to him, but he always insisted that I had broken my promise unreasonably. At the rate in which Oil City was left behind we knew our pace was very rapid, though to us it all seemed like a dead calm, for we kept just even with the wind. The Professor said we could reach New England by midnight if the wind held and it didn't grow cloudy; but alas! for the past hour we had been watching a little fleecy nebulous bit of mist that seemed, like a spirit, to spring from the nothingness of the blue ether, growing constantly, and attracting other cloudlets which came toward it from all quarters of the heavens and were swallowed up. A growing, whirling wall of pearly gray mounted and spread its shadow over half the earth. We threw out sand and mounted above it. Then it arose toward us again. It seemed as though we could reach our hands into its surging depths. Over went seats, baskets, the tent--everything we could spare, and I'm not sure the Professor didn't glare at one of his companions with malicious and deadly intent. The truth rushed upon us that we were racing with a storm.