balloon Hans constructed. How did he extricate himself
from each difficulty he encountered? What characteristic did this
show? Note the changes in the appearance of the earth as he made
his journey. On what day did he see the North Pole? In what region
was he when he saw the moon? What did he find when he reached that
body?

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

From the Earth to the Moon--Jules Verne.
The War of the Worlds--H. G. Wells.

THE GREAT STONE OF SARDIS[391-*]

This fanciful tale is taken from Frank R. Stockton's _The Great
Stone of Sardis_. In this book the hero, Roland Clewe, is pictured
as a scientist who had made many startling discoveries and
inventions at his works in Sardis about the year 1946. One of his
inventions was an automatic shell. This was an enormous projectile,
the peculiarity of which was that its motive power was contained
within itself, very much as a rocket contains the explosives which
send it upward. The extraordinary piece of mechanism was of
[v]cylindrical form, eighteen feet in length and fourteen feet in
diameter. The forward end was [v]conical and not solid, being
formed of a number of flat steel rings, decreasing in size as they
approached the point of the cone. When not in operation these rings
did not touch one another, but they could be forced together by
pressure on the point of the cone. One day this shell fell from the
supports on which it lay, the conical end down, and ploughed its
way with terrific force into the earth--how far no one could tell.
Clewe determined to descend the hole in search of the shell by
means of an electric elevator. Margaret Raleigh, to whom he was
engaged, had gone to the seashore, and during her absence, Clewe
planned to make his daring venture.

On the day that Margaret left Sardis, Roland began his preparations for
descending the shaft. He had so thoroughly considered the machinery and
appliances necessary for the undertaking and had worked out all his
plans in such detail, in his mind and upon paper, that he knew exactly
what he wanted to do. His orders for the great length of chain needed
exhausted the stock of several factories, and the engines he obtained
were even more powerful than he had intended them to be; but these he
could procure immediately, and for smaller ones he would have been
obliged to wait.