To his profound regret J. T. Maston had had to resign himself to staying at home. But he was not idle. After the construction of the immense telescope on the summit of Long’s Peak, one of the highest of the Rocky Mountains, he had transported himself there, and from the moment he found the projectile describing its majestic trajectory in the sky he never left his post of observation. At the eye-piece of the huge instrument he devoted himself to the task of following his friends as they journeyed in their strange carriage through space. It might be thought that the bold voyagers were for ever lost to earth. The projectile, drawn into a new orbit by the Moon, might gravitate eternally round the Queen of the Night as a sort of sub-satellite. But no! A deviation, which by many was called providential, had modified the projectile’s direction, and, after making the circle of the Moon, brought it back from that spheroid at a speed of 172,800 miles an hour at the moment it plunged into the ocean. Luckily the liquid mass of the Pacific had broken the fall, which had been perceived by the U.S. frigate _Susquehanna_. As soon as the news had reached J. T. Maston, he had set out in all haste from the observatory at Long’s Peak to the rescue of his friends. Soundings were taken in the vicinity of where the shell had been seen to fall, and the devoted Maston had not hesitated to go down in diver’s dress to find his friends. But such trouble was unnecessary. The projectile being of aluminium, displacing an amount of water greater than its own weight, had returned to the surface of the Pacific after a magnificent plunge. And President Barbicane, Captain Nicholl, and Michel Ardan were found in their floating prison playing dominoes. The part that Maston took in these extraordinary proceedings had brought him prominently to the front. He was not handsome, with his artificial cranium and his mechanical arm with its hook for a hand. He was not young, for fifty-eight years had chimed and struck at the date of our story’s beginning. But the originality of his character, the vivacity of his intelligence, the fire in his eye, the impetuosity with which he had attacked everything, had made him the beau-ideal of a man in the eyes of Evangelina Scorbitt. His brain, carefully protected beneath its gutta-percha roof was intact, and justly bore the reputation of being one of the most remarkable of the day. Mrs. Scorbitt—though the least calculation gave her a headache—had a taste for mathematicians if she had not one for mathematics. She looked upon them as upon beings of a peculiar and superior species. Heads where _x_’s knocked against _x_’s like nuts in a bag, brains which rejoiced in algebraic formulæ, hands which threw about triple integrals as an equilibrist plays with glasses and bottles, intelligences which understood this sort of thing: ∫∫∫Φ(_xyz_) _dx dy dz_