rever several pet
theories lately started regarding the nature of our satellite. He and
his friends had seen her with their own eyes, and under such favorable
circumstances as to be altogether exceptional. Regarding her formation,
her origin, her inhabitability, they could easily tell what system
_should_ be rejected and what _might_ be admitted. Her past, her
present, and her future, had been alike laid bare before their eyes. How
can you object to the positive assertion of a conscientious man who has
passed within a few hundred miles of _Tycho_, the culminating point in
the strangest of all the strange systems of lunar oreography? What reply
can you make to a man who has sounded the dark abysses of the _Plato_
crater? How can you dare to contradict those men whom the vicissitudes
of their daring journey had swept over the dark, Invisible Face of the
Moon, never before revealed to human eye? It was now confessedly the
privilege and the right of these men to set limits to that selenographic
science which had till now been making itself so very busy in
reconstructing the lunar world. They could now say, authoritatively,
like Cuvier lecturing over a fossil skeleton: "Once the Moon was this, a
habitable world, and inhabitable long before our Earth! And now the Moon
is that, an uninhabitable world, and uninhabitable ages and ages ago!"

We must not even dream of undertaking a description of the grand _fete_
by which the return of the illustrious members of the Gun Club was to be
adequately celebrated, and the natural curiosity of their countrymen to
see them was to be reasonably gratified. It was one worthy in every way
of its recipients, worthy of the Gun Club, worthy of the Great Republic,
and, best of all, every man, woman, and child in the United States could
take part in it. It required at least three months to prepare it: but
this was not to be regretted as its leading idea could not be properly
carried out during the severe colds of winter.

All the great railroads of the Union had been closely united by
temporary rails, a uniform gauge had been everywhere adopted, and every
other necessary arrangement had been made to enable a splendid palace
car, expressly manufactured for the occasion by Pullman himself, to
visit every chief point in the United States without ever breaking
connection. Through the principal street in each city, or streets if one
was not large enough, rails had been laid so as to admit the passage o