tried its speed against an express train on the Union Pacific.

At the end of this day the doubts of the learned world were at an
end. The body was not a product of nature, it was a flying machine,
the practical application of the theory of "heavier than air." And if
the inventor of the aeronef had wished to keep himself unknown he
could evidently have done better than to try it over the Far West. As
to the mechanical force he required, or the engines by which it was
communicated, nothing was known, but there could be no doubt the
aeronef was gifted with an extraordinary faculty of locomotion. In
fact, a few days afterwards it was reported from the Celestial
Empire, then from the southern part of India, then from the Russian
steppes.

Who was then this bold mechanician that possessed such powers of
locomotion, for whom States had no frontiers and oceans no limits,
who disposed of the terrestrial atmosphere as if it were his domain?
Could it be this Robur whose theories had been so brutally thrown in
the face of the Weldon Institute the day he led the attack against
the utopia of guidable balloons? Perhaps such a notion occurred to
some of the wide-awake people, but none dreamt that the said Robur
had anything to do with the disappearance of the president and
secretary of the Institute.

Things remained in this state of mystery when a telegram arrived from
France through the New York cable at 11:37 A.M. on July 13. And what
was this telegram? It was the text of the document found at Paris in
a snuff-box revealing what had happened to the two personages for
whom the Union was in mourning.