As soon as we were on board, the captain began questioning us about the
siege of Paris, from which city he had assumed that we must have come,
notwithstanding our immense distance from Europe. As may be supposed, I
had not heard a syllable about the war between France and Germany, and
was too ill to do more than assent to all that he chose to put into my
mouth. My knowledge of Italian is very imperfect, and I gathered little
from anything that he said; but I was glad to conceal the true point of
our departure, and resolved to take any cue that he chose to give me.
The line that thus suggested itself was that there had been ten or twelve
others in the balloon, that I was an English Milord, and Arowhena a
Russian Countess; that all the others had been drowned, and that the
despatches which we had carried were lost. I came afterwards to learn
that this story would not have been credible, had not the captain been
for some weeks at sea, for I found that when we were picked up, the
Germans had already long been masters of Paris. As it was, the captain
settled the whole story for me, and I was well content.
In a few days we sighted an English vessel bound from Melbourne to London
with wool.
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