Sure enough, under that very curious system of responsibility, by which one corporation owns the carriages which another corporation uses, nobody in the world has to this moment ever missed "The Lost Palace." On each connecting line, everybody knew that "she" was not there; but no one knew or asked where she was. The descent into the rocky bottom of the Chamoguin, more than fifteen hundred feet below the line of flight, had of course been rapid,--slow at first, but in the end rapid. In the first second, the lost palace had fallen sixteen feet; in the second, sixty-four; in the third, one hundred and forty-four; in the fourth, two hundred and fifty-six; in the fifth, four hundred feet; so that it must have been near the end of the sixth second of its fall, that, with a velocity now of more than six hundred feet in a second, the falling palace, with its unconscious passengers, fell upon the rocks at the bottom of the Chamoguin ravine. In the dead of night, wholly without jar or parting, those passengers must have been sleeping soundly; and it is impossible, therefore, on any calculation of human probability, that any one of them can have been waked an instant before the complete destruction of the palace, by the sudden shock of its fall upon the bed of the stream. To them the accident, if it is fair to call it so, must have been wholly free from pain. The tangles of that ravine, and the swamp below it, are such that I suppose that even the most adventurous huntsman never finds his way there. On the only occasion when I ever met Mr. Jules Verne, he expressed a desire to descend there from one of his balloons, to learn whether the inhabitants of "The Lost Palace" might not still survive, and be living in a happy republican colony there,--a place without railroads, without telegrams, without mails, and certainly without palaces. But at the moment when these sheets go to press, no account of such an adventure has appeared from his rapid pen. THE WESTERN GINEVRA. CHAPTER I. BOUGHT. As pretty a girl as there was in Ohio. And how much that says! Brunette, or of that tendency, yet with blue eyes. And how much that says! Tall and strong, not too plump, but still not scrawny, nor as a skeleton in clothing. I do not say that she could whip her weight in wild-cats; I do not know. Of that breed of animals few are left in Ohio, thanks to the prowess of the grandmothers of the present generation. But I do say that of the mother of the mother of Hester Bryan, of whom I write, this eulogy was simple truth. The _Puma concolor_, or native catamount of those regions, had yielded a hundred times before her prowess. And this I will add,--that Hester Bryan was just a bit taller and prettier than her mother, as she, in her day, was taller and prettier than hers. For there are worlds of life in which "Nature gives us more than all she ever takes away."