chances of taking Cronstadt. "If you send me," said the admiral, "with so many ships of the line, and so many gunboats, Cronstadt of course will be taken." "But," said a prudent lord, "suppose it should not be taken?" "That is impossible: it must be taken!" "Yes," persisted my lord, "you think so, no doubt; but still, if it should not be taken,--what then?" "What then?--why, there's an end of the British fleet!" The great men took alarm, and that admiral was not sent. But they misconstrued the meaning of his answer. He meant not to imply any considerable danger to the British fleet. He meant to prove that one hypothesis was impossible by the suggestion of a counter-impossibility more self-evident. "It is impossible but what I shall take Cronstadt!" "But if you don't take it!" "It is impossible but what I shall take it; for if I don't take it, there's an end of the British fleet; and as it is impossible that there should be an end of the British fleet, it is impossible that I should not take Cronstadt!"--Q.E.D. CHAPTER XII. In which everything depends on Sir Isaac's success in discovering the law of attraction. On the appointed evening, at eight o'clock, the great room of the Gatesboro' Athenaeum was unusually well filled. Not only had the Mayor exerted himself to the utmost for that object, but the hand-bill itself promised a rare relief from the prosiness of abstract enlightenment and elevated knowledge. Moreover, the stranger himself had begun to excite speculation and curiosity. He was an amateur, not a cut-and-dry professor. The Mayor and Mr. Williams had both spread the report that there was more in him than appeared on the surface; prodigiously learned, but extremely agreeable, fine manners, too!--Who could he be? Was Chapman his real name? etc.