And then the mad compass, shaken by the wild electric phenomena, confirmed me in my rapidly formed opinion. The mineral crust was about to burst, the heavy granite masses were about to rejoin, the fissure was about to close, the void was about to be filled up, and we poor atoms to be crushed in its awful embrace! "Uncle, Uncle!" I cried, "we are wholly, irretrievably lost!" "What, then, my young friend, is your new cause of terror and alarm?" he said in his calmest manner. "What fear you now?" "What do I fear now!" I cried in fierce and angry tones. "Do you not see that the walls of the shaft are in motion? Do you not see that the solid granite masses are cracking? Do you not feel the terrible, torrid heat? Do you not observe the awful boiling water on which we float? Do you not remark this mad needle? Every sign and portent of an awful earthquake!" My uncle coolly shook his head. "An earthquake," he replied in the most calm and provoking tone. "Yes." "My nephew, I tell you that you are utterly mistaken," he continued. "Do you not, can you not, recognize all the well-known symtons--" "Of an earthquake? By no means. I am expecting something far more important." "My brain is strained beyond endurance--what, what do you mean?" I cried. "An eruption, Harry." "An eruption," I gasped. "We are, then, in the volcanic shaft of a crater in full action and vigor." "I have every reason to think so," said the Professor in a smiling tone, "and I beg to tell you that it is the most fortunate thing that could happen to us." The most fortunate thing! Had my uncle really and truly gone mad? What did he mean by these awful words--what did he mean by this terrible calm, this solemn smile? "What!" cried I, in the height of my exasperation, "we are on the way to an eruption, are we? Fatality has cast us into a well of burning and boiling lava, of rocks on fire, of boiling water, in a word, filled with every kind of eruptive matter? We are about to be expelled, thrown up, vomited, spit out of the interior of the earth, in common with huge blocks of granite, with showers of cinders and scoriae, in a wild whirlwind of flame, and you say--the most fortunate thing which could happen to us." "Yes," replied the Professor, looking at me calmly from under his spectacles, "it is the only chance which remains to us of ever escaping from the interior of the earth to the light of day." It is quite impossible that I can put on paper the thousand strange, wild thoughts which followed this extraordinary announcement. But my uncle was right, quite right, and never had he appeared to me so audacious and so convinced as when he looked me calmly in the face and spoke of the chances of an eruption--of our being cast upon Mother Earth once more through the gaping crater of a volcano!