By rights and by precedents I should have been violently ill on the instant; but I did not have time to be ill.
My fellow traveler all this while was pointing out this thing and that to me--showing how the telephone operated; how his field glasses poised just before his eyes, being swung and balanced on a delicately adjusted suspended pivot; telling me how on a perfectly clear day--this October day was slightly hazy--we could see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the Cathedral at Rheims; gyrating his hands to explain the manner in which the horses, trotting away from us as we climbed upward, had given to the drum on the wagon a reverse motion, so that the cable was payed out evenly and regularly.

But I am afraid I did not listen closely.

My eyes were so busy that my ears loafed on the job.
For once in my life--and doubtlessly only once--I saw now understandingly a battle front.
It was spread before me--lines and dots and dashes on a big green and brown and yellow map.

Why, the whole thing was as plain as a chart.

I had a reserved seat for the biggest show on earth.
To be sure it was a gallery seat, for the terrace from which we started stood fully five hundred feet above the bottom of the valley, and we had ascended approximately seven hundred feet above that, giving us an altitude of, say, twelve hundred feet in all above the level of the river; but a gallery seat suited me.