"Skye? Dear me--capital, capital! Only, you see," he urged, "she wouldn't expect me to be in Skye." A minute later he drew me aside. "Excellent company your friend is, sir: most gentlemanly manners; but at times, if I may so say, not very gleg." My hands by this time were numb with cold. We had been ascending steadily, and Byfield's English thermometer stood at thirteen degrees. I borrowed from the heap a thicker overcoat, in the pocket of which I was lucky enough to find a pair of furred gloves; and leaned over for another look below, still with a corner of my eye for the aeronaut, who stood biting his nails, as far from me as the car allowed. The sea-fog had vanished, and the south of Scotland lay spread beneath us from sea to sea, like a map in monotint. Nay, yonder was England, with the Solway cleaving the coast--a broad, bright spearhead, slightly bent at the tip--and the fells of Cumberland beyond, mere hummocks on the horizon; all else flat as a board or as the bottom of a saucer. White threads of high-road connected town to town: the intervening hills had fallen down, and the towns, as if in fright, had shrunk into themselves, contracting their suburbs as a snail his horns. The old poet was right who said that the Olympians had a delicate view. The lace-makers of Valenciennes might have had the tracing of those towns and high-roads; those knots of _guipure_ and ligatures of finest _reseau_-work. And when I considered that what I looked down on--this, with its arteries and nodules of public traffic--was a nation; that each silent nodule held some thousands of men, each man moderately ready to die in defence of his shopboard and hen-roost; it came into my mind that my Emperor's emblem was the bee, and this Britain the spider's web, sure enough. Byfield came across and stood at my elbow. "Mr. Ducie, I have considered your offer, and accept it. It's a curst position----" "For a public character," I put in affably. "Don't, sir! I beg that you don't. Your words just now made me suffer a good deal: the more, that I perceive a part of them to be true. An aeronaut, sir, has ambition--how can he help it? The public, the newspapers, feed it for a while; they _fete_, and flatter, and applaud him. But in its heart the public ranks him with the mountebank, and reserves the right to drop him when tired of his tricks. Is it wonderful that he forgets this sometimes? For in his own thoughts he is not a mountebank--no, by God, he is not!" The man spoke with genuine passion. I held out my hand. "Mr. Byfield, my words were brutal. I beg you will allow me to take them back." He shook his head. "They were true, sir; partly true, that is." "I am not so sure. A balloon, as you hint and I begin to discover, may alter the perspective of man's ambitions. Here are the notes; and on the top of them I give you my word that you are not abetting a criminal. How long should the _Lunardi_ be able to maintain itself in the air?"