Presently, the heart-broken professor rallied, as was his nature, and, with a visible effort putting his great loss behind him, endeavoured to cheer up his comrades in peril. “So far we have passed through all danger without receiving material injury,--to ourselves, I mean,--and surely it is not too much to hope for eventual escape?” he said, earnestly, pressing the hands of his nephews, by way of additional encouragement. “Yes,” hesitated Bruno, with an involuntary shiver, as he glanced around them upon those furiously boiling clouds, then cast an eye upward, towards yonder clear sky. “Yes, but--in what manner?” “What'll we do when the cyclone goes bu'st?” cut in Waldo, with disagreeable bluntness. “It can't go on for ever, and when it splits up,--where will we be then?” “I wish it lay within my power to give you full assurance on all points, my dear boys,” the professor made reply. “I only wish I could ensure your perfect safety by giving my own poor remnant of life--” “No, no, uncle Phaeton!” cried the brothers, in a single breath. “How cheerfully, if I only might!” insisted the professor, his homely face wearing an expression of blended regret and unbounded affection. “But for me you would never have encountered these perils, nor ever--” Again he was interrupted by the brothers, and forced to leave that regret unspoken to the end. “Only for you, uncle Phaeton, what would have become of us when we were left without parents, home, fortune? Only for you, taking us in and treating us as though of your own flesh and blood--” “As you are, my good lads! Let it pass, then, but I must say that I do wish--well, well, let it pass, then!” A brief silence, which was spent in gripping hands and with eyes giving pledges of love and undying confidence; then Professor Featherwit spoke again, in an entirely different vein. “If nothing else, we have exploded one fallacy which has never met with contradiction, so far as my poor knowledge goes.” “And that is--what, uncle Phaeton?” “Observe, my lads,” with a wave of his hand towards those whirling walls, and then making a downward motion. “You see that we are floating in a partial vacuum, yet where there is air sufficient to preserve life under difficulties. And by looking downward--careful that you don't fall overboard through dizziness, though!” “Looks as though we were floating just above a bed of ugly wind!” declared Waldo, after taking a look below. “Precisely; the aerostat rests upon an air-cushion amply solid enough to sustain far more than our combined weight. But what is the generally accepted view, my dear boys?” “You tell, for we don't know how,” frankly acknowledged Waldo. “Thanks. Yet you are now far wiser than all of the scientists who have written and published whole libraries concerning these storm formations, but whose fallacies we are now fully prepared to explode, once for all, through knowledge won by personal investigation--ahem!”