gain by that! A bullet without a gun!"

"The gun we can make and the powder too!" replied Barbican confidently.
"Metal and sulphur and charcoal and saltpetre are likely enough to be
present in sufficient quantities beneath the Moon's surface. Besides, to
return is a problem of comparatively easy solution: we should have to
overcome the lunar attraction only--a slight matter--the rest of the
business would be readily done by gravity."

"Enough said on the subject!" exclaimed Ardan curtly; "how to get back
is indefinitely postponed! How to communicate with our friends on the
Earth, is another matter, and, as it seems to me, an extremely easy
one."

"Let us hear the very easy means by which you propose to communicate
with our friends on Earth," asked the Captain, with a sneer, for he was
by this time a little out of humor.

"By means of bolides ejected from the lunar volcanoes," replied the
Frenchman without an instant's hesitation.

"Well said, friend Ardan," exclaimed Barbican. "I am quite disposed to
acknowledge the feasibility of your plan. Laplace has calculated that a
force five times greater than that of an ordinary cannon would be
sufficient to send a bolide from the Moon to the Earth. Now there is no
cannon that can vie in force with even the smallest volcano."

"Hurrah!" cried Ardan, delighted at his success; "just imagine the
pleasure of sending our letters postage free! But--oh! what a splendid
idea!--Dolts that we were for not thinking of it sooner!"

"Let us have the splendid idea!" cried the Captain, with some of his old
acrimony.

"Why didn't we fasten a wire to the Projectile?" asked Ardan,
triumphantly, "It would have enabled us to exchange telegrams with the
Earth!"

"Ho! ho! ho!" roared the Captain, rapidly recovering his good humor;
"decidedly the best joke of the season! Ha! ha! ha! Of course you have
calculated the weight of a wire 240 thousand miles long?"

"No matter about its weight!" cried the Frenchman impetuously; "we
should have laughed at its weight! We could have tripled the charge of
the Columbiad; we could have quadrupled it!--aye, quintupled it, if
necessary!" he added in tones evidently increasing in loudness and
violence.

"Yes, friend Michael," observed Barbican; "but there is a slight and
unfortunately a fatal defect in your project. The Earth, by its
rotation, would have wrapped our wire around herself, like thread around
a spool, and dragged us back almost with the sp