ar of cheers coming from a hundred thousand throats.
She stopped at a height of about a thousand feet, and then her forward
searchlight flashed out, swept the horizon, and vanished. Then it
flashed out again intermittently in the longs and shorts of the Morse
Code, and these, when translated, read:

"Vote for sound men and sound money!"

In five minutes the wires of the United States were alive with the
terse, pregnant message, and under the ocean in the dark depths of the
Atlantic ooze, vivid narratives of the coming of the miracle went
flashing to a hundred newspaper offices in England and on the Continent.
The New York correspondent of the London _Daily Express_ added the
following paragraph to his account of the strange occurrence:

"The secret of this amazing vessel, which has proved itself capable of
traversing the Atlantic in a day, and of soaring beyond the limits of
the atmosphere at will, is possessed by one man only, and that man is an
English nobleman. The air is full of rumours of universal war. One
vessel such as this could scatter terror over a continent in a few days,
demoralise armies and fleets, reduce Society to chaos, and establish a
one-man despotism on the ruins of all the Governments of the world. The
man who could build one ship like this could build fifty, and, if his
country asked him to do it, no doubt he would. Those who, as we are
almost forced to believe, are even now contemplating a serious attempt
to dethrone England from her supreme place among the nations of Europe,
will do well to take this latest potential factor in the warfare of the
immediate future into their most serious consideration."

This paragraph was not perhaps as absolutely correct as a proposition in
Euclid, but it stopped the war. The _Deutschland_ came in the next day,
and again the press was flooded, this time with personal narratives, and
brilliantly imaginative descriptions of the Vision which had descended
from the clouds, made rings round the great liner going at her best
speed, and then vanished in an instant beyond the range of field-glasses
and telescopes.

Thus did the creature of Professor Rennick's inventive genius play its
first part as the peacemaker of the world.

When the _Astronef's_ message had been duly given and recorded, her
propellers began to revolve, and her head swung round to the north-east.
So began, as all the world now knows, the most extraordinary
electioneering trip that ever was know