But it was all to no purpose. I still fell with horrible speed, and was now not more than half a mile from the surface. As a last resource, therefore, having got rid of my coat, hat, and boots, I cut loose from the balloon the car itself, which was of no inconsiderable weight, and thus clinging with both hands to the net-work, I had barely time to observe that the whole country, as far as the eye could reach, was thickly sown with small habitations, ere I tumbled headlong into the very heart of a fantastic city and into the middle of a vast crowd of ugly little people. I turned from them, and gazing upward at the earth so lately left, and left perhaps forever, beheld it like a huge, dull copper shield, fixed immovably in the heavens overhead and tipped on one of its edges with a crescent border of the most brilliant gold. EDGAR ALLAN POE. =HELPS TO STUDY= Describe the balloon Hans constructed. How did he extricate himself from each difficulty he encountered? What characteristic did this show? Note the changes in the appearance of the earth as he made his journey. On what day did he see the North Pole? In what region was he when he saw the moon? What did he find when he reached that body? SUPPLEMENTARY READING From the Earth to the Moon--Jules Verne. The War of the Worlds--H. G. Wells. THE GREAT STONE OF SARDIS[391-*] This fanciful tale is taken from Frank R. Stockton's _The Great Stone of Sardis_. In this book the hero, Roland Clewe, is pictured as a scientist who had made many startling discoveries and inventions at his works in Sardis about the year 1946. One of his inventions was an automatic shell. This was an enormous projectile, the peculiarity of which was that its motive power was contained within itself, very much as a rocket contains the explosives which send it upward. The extraordinary piece of mechanism was of [v]cylindrical form, eighteen feet in length and fourteen feet in diameter. The forward end was [v]conical and not solid, being formed of a number of flat steel rings, decreasing in size as they approached the point of the cone. When not in operation these rings did not touch one another, but they could be forced together by pressure on the point of the cone. One day this shell fell from the supports on which it lay, the conical end down, and ploughed its way with terrific force into the earth--how far no one could tell. Clewe determined to descend the hole in search of the shell by means of an electric elevator. Margaret Raleigh, to whom he was engaged, had gone to the seashore, and during her absence, Clewe planned to make his daring venture.