ven't
been dreaming of this sort of thing."

Once the chill of my opposition was removed, his own pent-up excitement
had play. He too got up and paced. He too gesticulated and shouted. We
behaved like men inspired. We _were_ men inspired.

"We'll settle all that!" he said in answer to some incidental difficulty
that had pulled me up. "We'll soon settle that! We'll start the drawings
for mouldings this very night."

"We'll start them now," I responded, and we hurried off to the laboratory
to begin upon this work forthwith.

I was like a child in Wonderland all that night. The dawn found us both
still at work--we kept our electric light going heedless of the day. I
remember now exactly how these drawings looked. I shaded and tinted while
Cavor drew--smudged and haste-marked they were in every line, but
wonderfully correct. We got out the orders for the steel blinds and frames
we needed from that night's work, and the glass sphere was designed within
a week. We gave up our afternoon conversations and our old routine
altogether. We worked, and we slept and ate when we could work no longer
for hunger and fatigue. Our enthusiasm infected even our three men, though
they had no idea what the sphere was for. Through those days the man Gibbs
gave up walking, and went everywhere, even across the room, at a sort of
fussy run.

And it grew--the sphere. December passed, January--I spent a day
with a broom sweeping a path through the snow from bungalow to
laboratory--February, March. By the end of March the completion was in
sight. In January had come a team of horses, a huge packing-case; we
had our thick glass sphere now ready, and in position under the crane
we had rigged to sling it into the steel shell. All the bars and blinds
of the steel shell--it was not really a spherical shell, but polyhedral,
with a roller blind to each facet--had arrived by February, and the
lower half was bolted together. The Cavorite was half made by March, the
metallic paste had gone through two of the stages in its manufacture,
and we had plastered quite half of it on to the steel bars and blinds.
It was astonishing how closely we kept to the lines of Cavor's first
inspiration in working out the scheme. When the bolting together of
the sphere was finished, he proposed to remove the rough roof of the
temporary laboratory in which the work was done, and build a furnace
about it. So the last stage of Cavorite making, in which the paste is
heated to