CHAPTER III.
EFFECT OF THE PRESIDENT'S COMMUNICATION.
It is impossible to describe the effect produced by the last words ofthe honorable president--the cries, the shouts, the succession of roars,hurrahs, and all the varied vociferations which the American languageis capable of supplying. It was a scene of indescribable confusion anduproar. They shouted, they clapped, they stamped on the floor of thehall. All the weapons in the museum discharged at once could not have moreviolently set in motion the waves of sound. One need not be surprised atthis. There are some cannoneers nearly as noisy as theirown guns.
Barbicane remained calm in the midst of this enthusiastic clamour; perhapshe was desirous of addressing a few more words to his colleagues, for byhis gestures he demanded silence, and his powerful alarum was worn outby its violent reports. No attention, however, was paid to his request.He was presently torn from his seat and passed from the hands of hisfaithful colleagues into the arms of a no less excited crowd.
Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word"impossible" is not a French one. People have evidently been deceivedby the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as formechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise. BetweenBarbicane's proposition and its realization no true Yankee would haveallowed even the semblance of a difficulty to be possible. A thing withthem is no sooner said than done.
The triumphal progress of the president continued throughout the evening.It was a regular torchlight procession. Irish, Germans, French, Scotch,all the heterogeneous units which make up the population of Marylandshouted in their respective vernaculars; and the "vivas," "hurrahs," and"bravos" were intermingled in inexpressible enthusiasm.
Just at this crisis, as though she comprehended all this agitationregarding herself, the Moon shone forth with serene splendour, eclipsingby her intense illumination all the surrounding lights. The Yankeesall turned their gaze towards her resplendent orb, kissed their hands,called her by all kinds of endearing names. Between eight o'clock andmidnight one optician in Jones'-Fall Street made his fortune by the saleof opera-glasses.
Midnight arrived, and the enthusiasm showed no signs of diminution.It spread equally among all classes of citizens--men of science,shopkeepers, merchants, porters, chair-men, as well as "greenhorns,"were stirred in their innermost fibres. A national enterprise was atstake. 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 one chattered, argued, discussed, disputed, applauded,from the gentleman lounging upon the barroom settee with his tumbler ofsherry-cobbler before him down to the waterman who got drunk upon his"knock-me-down" in the dingy taverns of Fell Point.
About 2 a.m., however, the excitement began to subside. PresidentBarbicane reached his house, bruised, crushed, and squeezed almostto a mummy. A Hercules could not have resisted a similar outbreak ofenthusiasm. The crowd gradually deserted the squares and streets. Thefour railways from Philadelphia and Washington, Harrisburg and Wheeling,which converge at Baltimore, whirled away the heterogeneous populationto the four corners of the United States, and the city subsided intocomparative tranquillity.
Illustration: THE TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION.
On the following day, thanks to the telegraphic wires, five hundrednewspapers and journals, daily, weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly, alltook up the question. They examined it under all its different aspects,physical, meteorological, economical, or moral, up to its bearings onpolitics or civilization. They debated whether the moon was a finishedworld, or whether it was destined to undergo any further transformation.Did it resemble the earth at the period when the latter was destitute asyet of an atmosphere? What kind of spectacle would its hidden hemispherepresent to our terrestrial spheroid? Granting that the question atpresent was simply that of sending a projectile up to the moon, every onemust see that that involved the commencement of a series of experiments.All must hope that some day America would penetrate the deepest secretsof that mysterious orb; and some even seemed to fear lest its conquestshould not sensibly derange the equilibrium of Europe.
The project once under discussion, not a single paragraph suggested a doubtof its realization. All the papers, pamphlets, reports--all the journalspublished by the scientific, literary, and religious societies enlargedupon its advantages; and the Society of Natural History of Boston, theSociety of Science and Art of Albany, the Geographical and StatisticalSociety of New York, the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, and theSmithsonian of Washington sent innumerable letters of congratulation tothe Gun Club, together with offers of immediate assistance and money.
From that day forward Impey Barbicane became one of the greatest citizensof the United States, a kind of Washington of Science. A single trait offeeling, taken from many others, will serve to show the point which thishomage of a whole people to a single individual attained.
Some few days after this memorable meeting of the Gun Club, the managerof an English company announced, at the Baltimore theatre, the productionof "Much ado about Nothing." But the populace, seeing in that title anallusion damaging to Barbicane's project, broke into the auditorium,smashed the benches, and compelled the unlucky director to alter hisplaybill. Being a sensible man, he bowed to the public will and replacedthe offending comedy by "As you like it;" and for many weeks he realizedfabulous profits.
Illustration: CAMBRIDGE OBSERVATORY.