The theme excited my fancy, and I longed to give free rein to it in depicting my day-dreams about the scenery of the moon; in short, I longed to write a story embodying these dreams. The obvious difficulty, of course, was that of accounting for the narrator’s acquaintance with the satellite; and the equally obvious mode of surmounting the difficulty was the supposition of an extraordinary telescope. Poe spoke of this ambition to John Pendleton Kennedy, of Baltimore, already the author of “Swallow Barn,” and later to have the honour of writing, as the result of a jest by Thackeray, the fourth chapter of the second volume of “The Virginians.” Kennedy assured Poe that the mechanics of telescope construction were so fixed that it would be impossible to impart verisimilitude to a tale based on a superefficient telescope. So Poe resorted to other means of bringing the moon close to the reader’s eye: I fell back upon a style half plausible, half bantering, and resolved to give what interest I could to an actual passage from the earth to the moon, describing the lunar scenery as if surveyed and personally examined by the narrator. Poe wrote the first part of “Hans Pfaall,” and published it in the _Southern Literary Messenger_, of which he was then editor, at Richmond, Virginia. Three weeks afterward the first instalment of Locke’s moon story appeared in the _Sun_. At the moment Poe believed that his idea had been kidnapped: No sooner had I seen the paper than I understood the jest, which not for a moment could I doubt had been suggested by my own _jeu d’esprit_. Some of the New York journals--the _Transcript_, among others--saw the matter in the same light, and published the moon story side by side with “Hans Pfaall,” thinking that the author of the one had been detected in the author of the other. Although the details are, with some exceptions, very dissimilar, still I maintain that the general features of the two compositions are nearly identical. Both are hoaxes--although one is in a tone of mere banter, the other of down-right earnest; both hoaxes are on one subject, astronomy; both on the same point of that subject, the moon; both professed to have derived exclusive information from a foreign country; and both attempt to give plausibility by minuteness of scientific detail. Add to all this, that nothing of a similar nature had even been attempted before these two hoaxes, the one of which followed immediately upon the heels of the other. Having stated the case, however, in this form, I am bound to do Mr. Locke the justice to say that he denies having seen my article prior to the publication of his own; I am bound to add, also, that I believe him.