ourney into celestial space, could not fail to be
received like the prophet Elijah when he returned to the earth. To see
them first, to hear them afterwards, was the general desire.

This desire was to be very promptly realised by almost all the
inhabitants of the Union.

Barbicane, Michel Ardan, Nicholl, and the delegates of the Gun Club
returned without delay to Baltimore, and were there received with
indescribable enthusiasm. The president's travelling notes were ready to
be given up for publicity. The _New York Herald_ bought this manuscript
at a price which is not yet known, but which must have been enormous. In
fact, during the publication of the _Journey to the Moon_ they printed
5,000,000 copies of that newspaper. Three days after the travellers'
return to the earth the least details of their expedition were known.
The only thing remaining to be done was to see the heroes of this
superhuman enterprise.

The exploration of Barbicane and his friends around the moon had allowed
them to control the different theories about the terrestrial satellite.
These _savants_ had observed it _de visu_ and under quite peculiar
circumstances. It was now known which systems were to be rejected, which
admitted, upon the formation of this orb, its origin, and its
inhabitability. Its past, present, and future had given up their
secrets. What could be objected to conscientious observations made at
less than forty miles from that curious mountain of Tycho, the strangest
mountain system of lunar orography? What answers could be made to
_savants_ who had looked into the dark depths of the amphitheatre of
Pluto? Who could contradict these audacious men whom the hazards of
their enterprise had carried over the invisible disc of the moon, which
no human eye had ever seen before? It was now their prerogative to
impose the limits of that selenographic science which had built up the
lunar world like Cuvier did the skeleton of a fossil, and to say, "The
moon was this, a world inhabitable and inhabited anterior to the earth!
The moon is this, a world now uninhabitable and uninhabited!"

In order to welcome the return of the most illustrious of its members
and his two companions, the Gun Club thought of giving them a banquet;
but a banquet worthy of them, worthy of the American people, and under
such circumstances that all the inhabitants of the Union could take a
direct part in it.

All the termini of the railroads in the State were joined