zero along their respective graduated arcs; and simultaneously with the registration by the pressure gauge of a pressure of six pounds--which indicated the air-pressure in the air-chambers of the ship--the other dial registered zero, thus indicating that the partial exhaustion of the air in the air-chambers had rendered the ship so buoyant that she was now deprived of weight and was upon the point of floating upward, balloon-like, in the air. Another moment, and the incredible was happening; the ship had become converted into a gigantic metallic balloon, and the professor, extinguishing the electric light which illuminated the interior of the pilot-house, peered out through one of the circular ports in the walls of the structure, to see by the starlight that the _Flying Fish_ had already left the earth, and, in the still air, was rising in a perfectly horizontal position past the tops of the trees in the park. "Good!" muttered the lonely scientist to himself. "Everything works just as sweetly as it did that night, six years ago, when we backed out of the building-shed on the banks of the Thames, and started upon our first memorable journey!" He reversed the great wheel controlling the valve which admitted the vapour that drove the air out of the air-chambers of the great ship, thus creating a vacuum there by the subsequent and almost instant condensation of the vapour, and, softly made his way out on deck where, walking to the rail, he looked forth upon the landscape that was dimly widening out beneath him as the _Flying Fish_ continued to float gently upward.