gentlemen Brannan had brought over from Podunk with him,
paying their fares both ways, there were present only
three men,--all adventurers whose projects had failed,--
besides the representatives of the press. How, of these
representatives, some understood the whole, and some
understood nothing. How, the next day, all gave us
"first-rate notices." How, a few days after, in the
lower Horticultural Hall, we had our first public
meeting. How Haliburton brought us fifty people who
loved him,--his Bible class, most of them,--to help fill
up; how, besides these, there were not three persons whom
we had not asked personally, or one who could invent an
excuse to stay away. How we had hung the walls with
intelligible and unintelligible diagrams. How I opened
the meeting. Of that meeting, indeed, I must tell
something.

First, I spoke. I did not pretend to unfold the
scheme. I did not attempt any rhetoric. But I did not
make any apologies. I told them simply of the dangers of
lee-shores. I told them when they were most dangerous,--
when seamen came upon them unawares. I explained to them
that, though the costly chronometer, frequently adjusted,
made a delusive guide to the voyager who often made a
harbor, still the adjustment was treacherous, the
instrument beyond the use of the poor, and that, once
astray, its error increased forever. I said that we
believed we had a method which, if the means were
supplied for the experiment, would give the humblest
fisherman the very certainty of sunrise and of sunset in