The fare for the descent was fixed at five dollars per head;
and despite this high charge, during the two months which
preceded the experiment, the influx of visitors enabled the
Gun Club to pocket nearly five hundred thousand dollars!

It is needless to say that the first visitors of the Columbiad
were the members of the Gun Club. This privilege was justly
reserved for that illustrious body. The ceremony took place on
the 25th of September. A basket of honor took down the
president, J. T. Maston, Major Elphinstone, General Morgan,
Colonel Blomsberry, and other members of the club, to the number
of ten in all. How hot it was at the bottom of that long tube
of metal! They were half suffocated. But what delight!
What ecstasy! A table had been laid with six covers on the
massive stone which formed the bottom of the Columbiad, and
lighted by a jet of electric light resembling that of day itself.
Numerous exquisite dishes, which seemed to descend from heaven,
were placed successively before the guests, and the richest wines
of France flowed in profusion during this splendid repast, served
nine hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth!

The festival was animated, not to say somewhat noisy. Toasts flew
backward and forward. They drank to the earth and to her satellite,
to the Gun Club, the Union, the Moon, Diana, Phoebe, Selene, the
"peaceful courier of the night!" All the hurrahs, carried upward
upon the sonorous waves of the immense acoustic tube, arrived with
the sound of thunder at its mouth; and the multitude ranged round
Stones Hill heartily united their shouts with those of the ten
revelers hidden from view at the bottom of the gigantic Columbiad.