The courtyard of the Nord Railway Station was lighted by oil-lamps taken from locomotives; their silvered reflectors threw dazzling rays from all sides on the under portion of the immense yellow mass of the balloon; the upper portion was swaying to and fro with gigantic ungainliness in the strong breeze.  It was only a small balloon, as balloons are measured, but it seemed monstrous as it wavered over the human forms that were agitating themselves beneath it.  The cordage was silhouetted against the yellow taffetas as high up as the widest diameter of the balloon, but above that all was vague, and even spectators standing at a distance could not clearly separate the summit of the great sphere from the darkly moving sky.  The car, held by ropes fastened to stakes, rose now and then a few inches uneasily from the ground.  The sombre and severe architecture of the station-buildings enclosed the balloon on every hand; it had only one way of escape.  Over the roofs of that architecture, which shut out the sounds of the city, came the irregular booming of the bombardment.  Shells were falling in the southern quarters of Paris, doing perhaps not a great deal of damage, but still plunging occasionally into the midst of some domestic interior and making a sad mess of it.  The Parisians were convinced that the shells were aimed maliciously at hospitals and museums; and when a child happened to be blown to pieces their unspoken comments upon the Prussian savagery were bitter.  Their faces said:  “Those barbarians cannot even spare our children!” They amused themselves by creating a market in shells, paying more for a live shell than a dead one, and modifying the tariff according to the supply.  And as the cattle-market was empty, and the vegetable-market was empty, and beasts no longer pastured on the grass of the parks, and the twenty-five million rats of the metropolis were too numerous to furnish interest to spectators, and the Bourse was practically deserted, the traffic in shells sustained the starving mercantile instinct during a very dull period.  But the effect on the nerves was deleterious.  The nerves of everybody were like nothing but a raw wound.  Violent anger would spring up magically out of laughter, and blows out of caresses.  This indirect consequence of the bombardment was particularly noticeable in the group of men under the balloon.  Each behaved as if he were controlling his temper in the most difficult circumstances.  Constantly they all gazed upwards into the sky, though nothing could possibly be distinguished there save the blurred edge of a flying cloud.  But the booming came from that sky; the shells that were dropping on Montrouge came out of that sky; and the balloon was going up into it; the balloon was ascending into its mysteries, to brave its dangers, to sweep over the encircling ring of fire and savages.