comet that had lost its way. With what a soft sweet light
every star glowed! No matter what its magnitude, the stream that flowed
from it looked calm and holy. No twinkling, no scintillation, no
nictitation, disturbed their pure and lambent gleam. No atmosphere here
interposed its layers of humidity or of unequal density to interrupt the
stately majesty of their effulgence. The longer he gazed upon them, the
more absorbing became their attraction. He felt that they were great
kindly eyes looking down even yet with benevolence and protection on
himself and his companions now driving wildly through space, and lost
in the pathless depths of the black ocean of infinity!

He soon became aware that his friends, following his example, had
interested themselves in gazing at the stars, and were now just as
absorbed as himself in the contemplation of the transcendent spectacle.
For a long time all three continued to feast their eyes on all the
glories of the starry firmament; but, strange to say, the part that
seemed to possess the strangest and weirdest fascination for their
wandering glances was the spot where the vast disc of the Moon showed
like an enormous round hole, black and soundless, and apparently deep
enough to permit a glance into the darkest mysteries of the infinite.

A disagreeable sensation, however, against which they had been for some
time struggling, at last put an end to their contemplations, and
compelled them to think of themselves. This was nothing less than a
pretty sharp cold, at first somewhat endurable, but which soon covered
the inside surface of the window panes with a thick coating of ice. The
fact was that, the Sun's direct rays having no longer an opportunity of
warming up the Projectile, the latter began to lose rapidly by radiation
whatever heat it had stored away within its walls. The consequence was a
very decided falling of the thermometer, and so thick a condensation of
the internal moisture on the window glasses as to soon render all
external observations extremely difficult, if not actually impossible.

The Captain, as the oldest man in the party, claimed the privilege of
saying he could stand it no longer. Striking a light, he consulted the
thermometer and cried out:

"Seventeen degrees below zero, centigrade! that is certainly low enough
to make an old fellow like me feel rather chilly!"

"Just one degree and a half above zero, Fahrenheit!" observed Barbican;
"I really had no idea t