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"I do not mean," said he, "to play the part of Adam with a daughter of Eve up there. I might meet with serpents!" As soon as he could withdraw from the joys of triumph, too often repeated, he went with his friends to pay a visit to the Columbiad. He owed it that. Besides, he was getting very learned in ballistics since he had lived with Barbicane, J.T. Maston, and tutti quanti.
Hence between them arose endless discussions and violent disputes, Belfast affirming that the projectile was not visible, J.T. Maston affirming that any one but a blind man could see it. "It is the bullet!" repeated J.T. Maston. "No!" answered Belfast, "it is an avalanche falling from a lunar mountain!" "Well, then, we shall see it to-morrow." "No, it will be seen no more.
He was full of inexhaustible gaiety, laughing, joking, playing pranks upon the worthy J.T. Maston, and was, in a word, "French," and, what is worse, "Parisian," till the last second. Ten o'clock struck.
I have, therefore, the right to affirm, and I will repeat it with a conviction you will all share distance is a vain word; distance does not exist!" "Well said! Bravo! Hurrah!" cried the assembly with one voice, electrified by the gesture and accent of the orator, and the boldness of his conceptions. "No!" cried J.T. Maston, more energetically than the others; "distance does not exist!"
You will not forget seven-thirty, Café Maston, Boulevard des Italiennes." She drove off in a little fiacre, nodding and smiling at Sir John, who remained upon the Avenue. He too, when she had disappeared, called a carriage. "Hotel Ritz," he said mechanically to the coachman. "If only her sister is half as pretty, no wonder that she has set the Parisians talking."
But now I think of it, if we do not return to earth J.T. Maston will certainly come to us!" "Yes! he will come," replied Barbicane; "he is a worthy and courageous comrade. Besides, what could be easier? Is not the Columbiad still lying in Floridian soil? Is cotton and nitric acid wanting wherewith to manufacture the projectile? Will not the moon again pass the zenith of Florida?
Alas! what is wanting to our spheroid to reach this perfection is very little! an axis of rotation less inclined on the plane of its orbit." "Well!" cried an impetuous voice, "let us unite our efforts, invent machines, and rectify the earth's axis!" Thunders of applause greeted this proposition, the author of which could be no other than J.T. Maston.
Almost at the same moment in which the Secretary of Marine, the vice-president of the Gun Club, and the sub-director of the Observatory received the dispatch from San Francisco, the Honorable J. T. Maston was undergoing the greatest excitement he had ever experienced in his life, an excitement which even the bursting of his pet gun, which had more than once nearly cost him his life, had not caused him.
We know that this gigantic instrument had been set up on the reflecting system, called "front view" by the English. This arrangement only gave one reflection of objects, and consequently made the view much clearer. The result was that J.T. Maston and Belfast, whilst observing, were stationed in the upper part of the instrument instead of in the lower.
"You surely don't think of mounting a mass like that upon a carriage?" asked the major. "It would be a superb idea, though," said Maston. "But impracticable," replied Barbicane. "No, I think of sinking this engine in the earth alone, binding it with hoops of wrought iron, and finally surrounding it with a thick mass of masonry of stone and cement.
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