self over the
head.

"Oh!" he cried in accents between a yell and a groan, "what chuckleheads
we are! What numskulls! What jackasses! What double-treble-barrelled
gibbering idiots!" Then he fell to beating himself over the head again.

"What's the matter, Marston, for heaven's sake!" cried his friends,
vainly trying to hold him.

"Speak for yourself!" cried others, Belfast among the number.

"No exception, Belfast! You're as bad as the rest of us! We're all a set
of unmitigated, demoralized, dog-goned old lunatics! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

"Speak plainly, Marston! Tell us what you mean!"

"I mean," roared the terrible Secretary, "that we are no better than a
lot of cabbage heads, dead beats, and frauds, calling ourselves
scientists! O Barbican, how you must blush for us! If we were
schoolboys, we should all be skinned alive for our ignorance! Do you
forget, you herd of ignoramuses, that the Projectile weighs only ten
tons?"

"We don't forget it! We know it well! What of it?"

"This of it: it can't sink in water without displacing its own volume
in water; its own volume in water weighs thirty tons! Consequently, it
can't sink; more consequently, it hasn't sunk; and, most consequently,
there it is before us, bobbing up and down all the time under our very
noses! O Barbican, how can we ever venture to look at you straight in
the face again!"

Marston's extravagant manner of showing it did not prevent him from
being perfectly right. With all their knowledge of physics, not a single
one of those scientific gentlemen had remembered the great fundamental
law that governs sinking or floating bodies. Thanks to its slight
specific gravity, the Projectile, after reaching unknown depths of ocean
through the terrific momentum of its fall, had been at last arrested in
its course and even obliged to return to the surface.

By this time, all the passengers of the _Susquehanna_ could easily
recognize the object of such weary longings and desperate searches,
floating quietly a short distance before them in the last rays of the
declining day!

The boats were out in an instant. Marston and his friends took the
Captain's gig. The rowers pulled with a will towards the rapidly nearing
Projectile. What did it contain? The living or the dead? The living
certainly! as Marston whispered to those around him; otherwise how could
they have ever run up that flag?

The boats approached in perfect silence, all hearts throbbing with the
intensity o