“What do you ride?” asked the captain, looking him up and down, as if either about to measure him for a suit of clothes, or considering where he could most advantageously plant a blow from his ox-hoof-like fist.

“A pony—­at least, I used to ride a pony when I was at home:  but that is a long time ago, and I have not ridden much since.”

“I mean, what do you weigh,” said the captain, laughing.

“A little over ten stone.”

“Is it possible! why, I pull the scales at seventeen stun.  I’d give something to be your weight.  Think of the ballast you might take up with you!”

“Is that an important thing?” Josiah asked, his old instinct of gaining knowledge manifesting itself.

“It’s simply everything.  That’s how I managed to get over to the Orkneys.  These fellows that go up in balloons which they fit up like first-floor rooms, and take everything with them except a feather bed, don’t know anything about it.  They go fumbling around with a few pounds of ballast, and when they get into a wrong current there they stick.  Now, between you and me, Mr. Smith, I don’t mind telling you my secret of successful ballooning.  Take as much ballast as you can carry, and when you get stuck in a calm or carried off by a wrong current, out goes your ballast, up you shoot, get into another current, and there you are.  Ten stun!” he murmured, gazing wistfully upon the spare figure of his host.  “There ought to be a good deal done with that.  Tell you what, old chappie, you shall come with me to-morrow.”

Josiah had been a few moments ago possessed with a burning desire to go up in a balloon, but at these words the fire went out and he felt a cold chill steal over his body.  Still, he would like to go; but not to-morrow.  If it were next month or next week it would be different.  But to-morrow was so sudden.

“I rather fancy I have an engagement to-morrow,” he said, producing his pocket diary and anxiously gazing on it in the month of December.

“Nonsense!” said the captain, laying his large hand on Josiah’s shoulder, conveying to him an impression that if he pleased he could take him up, put him in his coat-tail pocket, walk off, and think no more about him till he landed him in a balloon.  “You’ve no engagement, and if you had you couldn’t find it by holding your book upside down.  You come along with me.  There’s not the slightest danger, and it’s not every man who has crossed the Channel in a balloon.”

“The Channel!” cried Josiah feebly.  He had thought of some little excursion.  Perhaps in the fields ten or twenty miles off.  “I don’t think I would like to start with the Channel.  Suppose we begin somewhere else, and try the Channel later on.  It will be better—­if anything happened, you know—­to have the water warm.”

“Nonsense,” said the captain cheerily; “we shall never be nearer the water than 2,000 feet.  We’ll dine in Paris to-morrow night, and I’ll take you to the Closerie after dinner.  It will do them good to see you there.  Now that’s settled, and you’d better go to bed straight off.  We’ll have to be up early in the morning to catch the mail train for Dover.  I’ve got my balloon there all ready, and we’ll start about noon.”