It will be remembered that a few years after the War of Secession certain members of the Gun Club, tired of doing nothing, had proposed to send a projectile to the Moon by means of a monster Columbiad. A gun nine hundred feet long had been solemnly cast at Tampa Town, in the Floridan peninsula, and loaded with 400,000 lbs. of fulminating cotton. Shot out by this gun, a cylindro-conical shell of aluminium had been sent flying among the stars of the night under a pressure of six million millions of litres of gas. Owing to a deviation of the trajectory, the projectile had gone round the Moon and fallen back to the earth, dropping into the Pacific Ocean in lat. 27° 7′ N., long. 141° 37′ west; when the frigate _Susquehanna_ had secured it, to the great satisfaction of its passengers. Of its passengers, two members of the Gun Club, the president, Impey Barbicane, and Captain Nicholl, with a hare-brained Frenchman, had taken passage in the projectile and had all returned from the voyage safe and sound. But if the two Americans were then present ready to risk their lives in some new adventure, it was not so with Michel Ardan. He had returned to Europe, and made a fortune, and was now planting cabbages in his retirement, if the best-informed reporters were to be believed. Barbicane and Nicholl had also retired, comparatively speaking, but they had retired only to dream of some new enterprise of a similar character. They were in no want of money. From their last undertaking there remained nearly two hundred thousand dollars out of the five millions and a half yielded by the public subscriptions of the old and new worlds; and by exhibiting themselves in their aluminium projectile throughout the United States they had realized enough wealth and glory to satisfy the most exacting of human ambitions. They would have been content if idleness had not been wearisome to them; and it was probably in order to find something to do that they had now bought the Arctic regions. But it should not be forgotten that if they had paid for their purchase eight hundred thousand dollars and more, it was because Evangelina Scorbitt had advanced the balance they required. Although Barbicane and Nicholl enjoyed incomparable celebrity, there was one who shared it with them. This was J. T. Maston, the impetuous secretary of the Gun Club. Was it not this able mathematician who had made the calculations which had enabled the great experiment to be made? If he had not accompanied his two colleagues on their extraordinary voyage, it was not from fear; certainly not! But the worthy gunner wanted a right arm, and had a gutta-percha cranium, owing to one of those accidents so common in warfare; and if he had shown himself to the Selenites it might have given them an erroneous idea of the inhabitants of the Earth, of which the Moon after all is but the humble satellite.