fell on them like a thunder clap.

We must, of course, decline all attempts at describing the effects of
this most unexpected intelligence on the world at large.

The Secretary of the Navy immediately telegraphed directions to the
_Susquehanna_ to keep a full head of steam up night and day so as to be
ready to give instant execution to orders received at any moment.

The Observatory authorities at Cambridge held a special meeting that
very evening, where, with all the serene calmness so characteristic of
learned societies, they discussed the scientific points of the question
in all its bearings. But, before committing themselves to any decided
opinion, they unanimously resolved to wait for the development of
further details.

At the rooms of the Gun Club in Baltimore there was a terrible time. The
kind reader no doubt remembers the nature of the dispatch sent one day
previously by Professor Belfast from the Long's Peak observatory,
announcing that the Projectile had been seen but that it had become the
Moon's satellite, destined to revolve around her forever and ever till
time should be no more. The reader is also kindly aware by this time
that such dispatch was not supported by the slightest foundations in
fact. The learned Professor, in a moment of temporary cerebral
excitation, to which even the greatest scientist is just as liable as
the rest of us, had taken some little meteor or, still more probably,
some little fly-speck in the telescope for the Projectile. The worst of
it was that he had not only boldly proclaimed his alleged discovery to
the world at large but he had even explained all about it with the well
known easy pomposity that "Science" sometimes ventures to assume. The
consequences of all this may be readily guessed. The Baltimore Gun Club
had split up immediately into two violently opposed parties. Those
gentlemen who regularly conned the scientific magazines, took every word
of the learned Professor's dispatch for gospel--or rather for something
of far higher value, and more strictly in accordance with the highly
advanced scientific developments of the day. But the others, who never
read anything but the daily papers and who could not bear the idea of
losing Barbican, laughed the whole thing to scorn. Belfast, they said,
had seen as much of the Projectile as he had of the "Open Polar Sea,"
and the rest of the dispatch was mere twaddle, though asserted with all
the sternness of a religious dogma an