Chapter 3 - Page 2

joy, gin, and whisky. Every one chattered, argued, discussed,
disputed, applauded, from the gentleman lounging upon the barroom
settee with his tumbler of sherry-cobbler before him down to the
waterman who got drunk upon his "knock-me-down" in the dingy taverns
of Fell Point.

About two A.M., however, the excitement began to subside.
President Barbicane reached his house, bruised, crushed, and
squeezed almost to a mummy. Hercules could not have resisted a
similar outbreak of enthusiasm. The crowd gradually deserted
the squares and streets. The four railways from Philadelphia
and Washington, Harrisburg and Wheeling, which converge at
Baltimore, whirled away the heterogeneous population to the four
corners of the United States, and the city subsided into
comparative tranquility.

On the following day, thanks to the telegraphic wires, five
hundred newspapers and journals, daily, weekly, monthly, or
bi-monthly, all took up the question. They examined it under
all its different aspects, physical, meteorological, economical,
or moral, up to its bearings on politics or civilization.
They debated whether the moon was a finished world, or whether
it was destined to undergo any further transformation. Did it
resemble the earth at the period when the latter was destitute
as yet of an atmosphere? What kind of spectacle would its hidden
hemisphere present to our terrestrial spheroid? Granting that
the question at present was simply that of sending a projectile
up to the moon, every one must see that that involved the
commencement of a series of experiments. All must hope that
some day America would penetrate the deepest secrets of that
mysterious orb; and some even seemed to fear lest its conquest
should not sensibly derange the equilibrium of Europe.

The project once under discussion, not a single paragraph
suggested a doubt of its realization. All the papers,
pamphlets, reports-- all the journals published by the
scientific, literary, and religious societies enlarged upon its
advantages; and the Society of Natural History of Boston, the
Society of Science and Art of Albany, the Geographical and
Statistical Society of New York, the Philosophical Society of
Philadelphia, and the Smithsonian of Washington sent innumerable
letters of congratulation to the Gun Club, together with offers
of immediate assistance and money.

From that day forward Impey Barbicane became one of the greatest
citizens of the United States, a kind of Washington of science.
A single trait of feeling, taken from many others, will serve to
show the point which this homage of a whole people to a single
individual attained.

Some few days after this memorable meeting of the Gun Club, the
manager of