From the Earth to the Moon direct in ninety-seven hours and twenty minutes, and a trip round it . wellas greenhorns, were stirred in their innermost fibres. Anational enterprise was at stake. The whole city, high and low,the quays bordering the Patapsco, the ships lying in the basins,disgorged a crowd drunk with joy, gin, and whisky. Every onechattered, argued, discussed, disputed, applauded, from the gentle-man lounging upon the bar-room settee with his tumbler ofsherry-cobbler before him down to the waterman who gotdrunk upon his knock-me-down in the dingy taverns of FellPoint. About 2 ,
From the Earth to the Moon direct in ninety-seven hours and twenty minutes, and a trip round it . wellas greenhorns, were stirred in their innermost fibres. Anational enterprise was at stake. The whole city, high and low,the quays bordering the Patapsco, the ships lying in the basins,disgorged a crowd drunk with joy, gin, and whisky. Every onechattered, argued, discussed, disputed, applauded, from the gentle-man lounging upon the bar-room settee with his tumbler ofsherry-cobbler before him down to the waterman who gotdrunk upon his knock-me-down in the dingy taverns of FellPoint. About 2 , however, the excitement began to Barbicane reached his house, bruised, crushed, andsqueezed almost to a mummy. A Hercules could not have re-sisted a similar outbreak of enthusiasm. The crowd graduallydeserted the squares and streets. The four railways fromPhiladelphia .and Washington, Harrisburg and Wheeling, whichconveige at Baltimore, whirled away the heterogeneous popula-tion to the four corners of the United States, and the city sub-sided into comparative THE TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION. [p. 16.] ERFECT OF THE PRESIDENTS COMMUNICATION. 17 On the following day, thanks to the telegraphic wires, fivehundred newspapers and journals, daily, weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly, all took up the question. They examined it under allits difierent aspects, physical, meteorological, economical, ormoral, up to its bearings on politics or civilization. Tliey debatedwhether the moon was a finished world, or whether it was des-tined to undergo any further transformation. Did it resemblethe earth at the period when the latter was destitute as yet of anatmosphere ? What kind of spectacle would its hidden hemi-sphere present to our terrestrial spheroid ? Granting that thequestion at present was simply that of sending a projectile up tothe moon, every one must see that that involved the commence-ment of a series of experiments. All must hope that some dayAmerica would pe
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