Captain.

"Hadn't we better open fire on her?" asked the Executive Officer.

"Not yet. I think we'd better get close enough to hail her first," answered the Captain. "She may not be anything more than a pleasure craft, you know."

The balloon was inflated by this time, and was tugging at the heavy steel hawsers by which it was attached to the cutter's hull. A cry of surprise broke from the crew of the British cruiser.

"Look! look! She's going up!"

The great balloon, inflated with the newly discovered gas, mercurite, the lightest and most powerful of all known gases, was lifting the cutter bodily into the air. Her curiously shaped hull, modelled after a shark's body, and equipped with a fin-keel for sailing on the wind, was now fully revealed. At the same instant a United States ensign was waved over her stern by a young man.

"Mr. Cortis," called the Captain, who had not thought it necessary yet to enter the conning-tower, "give him a taste of your metal."

"Ay, ay, sir," answered the Lieutenant in command of the forward 8-inch guns.

The next instant there was a terrific concussion, and one of the big shells went screaming toward the cutter: but she was rising so fast that the projectile passed under her, and plunged foaming into the sea a mile away.

"More elevation, sir," cried the Executive Officer.

"Impossible!" answered Lieutenant Cortis: "we're too close to her, and the angle is too high."

"Look at her now!" exclaimed the Captain. "She's rushing toward us!"

"Sailing against the wind with a balloon!" cried Commander Bilton-Brooks.

The shark-bodied cutter, with her fin-keel below and her balloon above, was indeed now moving toward a position above the cruiser.

"Call away the riflemen!" cried the Captain.

The red-coated marines assembled on the superstructures, and began a rapid fire at the balloon, hoping to burst it. But their bullets simply glanced off the fine steel netting with which it was protected. Now the head of the young man once again appeared above the bulwarks of the strange machine, and he took a rapid glance at the British ship. The next instant a small port in the cutter's side opened, and from it dropped a glass globe about half the size of a football. The globe fell upon the forward deck of the cruiser. There was an appalling explosion, and the whole forecastle of the Ajax III. became a hopeless wreck. Another globe was hurled with such fatal accuracy that it fell down one of the smoke-stacks of the now helpless vessel. There was a roar as of thunder away down in her engine-room, and pale-faced men poured on deck.

"We're sinking! The ship's bottom is blown out!" they cried. There was a wild rush to lower away the boats. A few minutes later the Ajax III. sank out of sight under the fine waters of the Caribbean Sea, and Harry Borden, with his balloon stowed and his canvas spread again, was sailing away with a few survivors of the ill-fated cruiser in his strange invention in search of more British cruisers. A month later the war was over.

THE BILBERRY SCHOOL EXHIBITION.

BY SOPHIE SWETT.

Simpsy Judkins was to "speak a piece," and Viola Treddick to read an original composition; there was to be a glee sung by picked voices from the first class—it was all about the deep blue sky, and "the sky, the sky, the sky," was repeated in a very thrilling and effective manner; and Tom Burtis was to display his powers as a lightning calculator. The exhibition was to be given in the new Town-hall, and not only would all Bilberry be there, but a crowd of people from the adjacent towns as well, to say nothing of teachers and pupils from the Normal School at Cocheco; for the Bilberry Hill School exhibitions had acquired a reputation.

In the Treddick family the girls had been obliged to take the family burden upon their shoulders. When Father Treddick died, somewhat less than a month after Mother Treddick, turning his face to the wall, and saying that she had been his backbone and his underpinning and he couldn't live without her (it sometimes happens that way in spite of Mother Nature), the rocks still had the upper hands on the little farm, and Amasa, the only boy, was but eleven. Lizette, who was fifteen, went to work in the stocking factory. Every one thought it was a pity, because Lizette was fond of books and had meant to be a teacher; she was slight and delicate, too, and work in the stocking factory was hard. But Lizette believed in doing "not what ye would, but what you may," with just as good a will as if it were the former. Some people said she had taken warning by her father's example; he had always been trying to invent something in his queer little workshop that was the wood-shed chamber; that was why the rocks had not been gotten out of the farm.

It was Viola who was now spoken of as a remarkably fine scholar, just as Lizette had been before she went into the factory; she was not yet sixteen, but she hoped to get the Pine Bank School to teach in September. There were several other candidates, all older than she, but Viola was at the head of her class, and that original composition which she was to read at the exhibition was expected to make an impression upon the committee-men. The teacher had said to several people that it was really a remarkable production for a girl of Viola's age, and they thought a great deal of literary gifts in Bilberry.

Lizette was very proud of Viola, and so, indeed, was Amasa, who was fourteen now, but whose name was not on the programme at all. To tell the painful truth at once, although Amasa keenly felt the especial need there was that he should be "smart," although he tried his best to be the man of the family in a satisfactory sense, yet he was at the very foot of his class; fractions floored him, and he had a hazy idea that Timbuctoo was out West, and that Captain John Smith discovered America. When it came to chopping wood, Amasa was pretty sure to cut his toe, and if he went fishing he tumbled into the pond. And he couldn't get "jobs," like Cosy Pringle, the boy in the next house, who had money in the bank.

Cosy Pringle boasted that he always "came out top of the heap"; but some people thought he was too "smart."

When the exhibition day came, although Simpsy Judkins had been announced to "speak a piece," it was Cosy Pringle who spoke it; there was a report that he had hired Simpsy to have a sore throat. Simpsy had oratorical gifts, but he did not feel the advantages of appearing in public and having his name in the paper, as Cosy did. Cosy held the second rank in declamation, so Simpsy's sore throat gave him an opportunity to be heard. He wasn't second in his class; he came sympathizingly near to Amasa there; but he had carefully weighed opinions—which he sometimes confided to Amasa—concerning the amount of study that "paid."

Mother Nature provided one of her loveliest days, as she is apt to do for school exhibitions in June. The girls, in fleecy muslin clouds, were so much in evidence that the boys, in the background, were only a little hampered by the embarrassment of full dress. Cosy Pringle wasn't hampered at all; he wore his grandfather's large gold chain and his sister Amanda's moonstone ring, and felt that he ought to attract as much attention as the girls.

Cosy's voice was a little thin and sharp, but he recited one of Macaulay's lays with a great deal of "r-r-rolling drum" very well indeed, having been thoroughly coached by his sister Amanda and the young minister to whom Amanda was going to be married.

But beyond a little mild clapping, the recitation received no attention whatever, while Viola Treddick's composition was, as the Bilberry Beacon reported, received with the greatest enthusiasm. It was on "School-girl Friendships," and there was some real fun in it; and once in a while it was pathetic, or, at all events, the audience