Viewing A Battle from a Balloon She was anchored to earth in a good-sized field.

Woods horizoned the field on three of its edges and a sunken road bounded it on the fourth.
She measured, I should say at an offhand guess, seventy-five feet from tip to tip lengthwise, and she was perhaps twenty feet in diameter through her middle.

She was a bright yellow in color--a varnished, oily-looking yellow--and in shape suggestive of a frankfurter.
At the end of her near the ground and on the side that was underneath -- for she swung, you understand, at an angle--a swollen protuberance showed, as though an air bubble had got under the skin of the sausage during the packing and made a big blister.

She drooped weakly amidships, bending and swaying this way and that; and, as we came under her and looked up, we saw that the skin of the belly kept shrinking in and wrinkling up, in the unmistakable pangs of acute cramp colic.
She had a sickly, depleted aspect elsewhere, and altogether was most flabby and unreliable looking; yet this, as I learned subsequently, was her normal appearance.

Being in the business of spying she practiced deceit, with the deliberate intent of seeming to be what, emphatically, she was not.