I knew by the feeling of increasing weight that what my companion said must be true, but we could not then appreciate the dreadful nature of our condition, so wrapped up were we in the grandeur of the object before our eyes. To those who have never been on the moon in such circumstances it will be impossible to adequately describe our feelings as we gazed upon our late home and knew that we were fast drifting away from it. There the round globe hung, as I had often pictured it in my imagination--oceans and continents, mountains, lakes, and rivers, all spread out before us--the greatest object lesson ever seen by the eye of man. As we studied it, recognizing feature after feature, lands and waters that we knew by their familiar shape, the doctor broke our reverie with these words, evidently with the endeavor to keep up my spirits: “That looks as natural as a map, doesn’t it? You have seen globes with those divisions pictured on them, but there is the globe itself. If our summer tourists could take in this experience also, it would make a vacation worth having. Isn’t it grand? I see you are thinking about our personal peril, but I think I know men who would take the risk and put themselves in our place for the sake of this magnificent view.” “If you know of any way to send for one of those friends, I wish you would do so,” I replied. “I would willingly give him my place.” It may be believed that we were all this time anxiously watching the earth, and it did not lessen our anxiety to realize that we were traveling very rapidly away from it. I had reached a point now where I did not place much dependence upon the doctor’s science, but to get some expression of his thoughts I said to him: “Well, have you any opinion about our fate? Are we doomed to pass the remainder of our lives circling around our dear old earth, looking upon her face day by day but never to approach her again?” “I think you have stated the case about as it is,” said he, “if, indeed, this rate of speed does not carry us entirely beyond the earth’s attraction, out into illimitable space.” The thought of such an additional catastrophe silenced me, especially as I could not deny its possibility. Life on the moon, if we could only keep the earth in sight even, seemed almost endurable now, beside the idea that we might be cast out to shift for ourselves, without a tie save such as the universal law of gravitation might find for us somewhere.