of Fell Point.

About two A.M., however, the excitement began to subside.
President Barbicane reached his house, bruised, crushed, and
squeezed almost to a mummy. Hercules could not have resisted a
similar outbreak of enthusiasm. The crowd gradually deserted
the squares and streets. The four railways from Philadelphia
and Washington, Harrisburg and Wheeling, which converge at
Baltimore, whirled away the heterogeneous population to the four
corners of the United States, and the city subsided into
comparative tranquility.

On the following day, thanks to the telegraphic wires, five
hundred newspapers and journals, daily, weekly, monthly, or
bi-monthly, all took up the question. They examined it under
all its different aspects, physical, meteorological, economical,
or moral, up to its bearings on politics or civilization.
They debated whether the moon was a finished world, or whether
it was destined to undergo any further transformation. Did it
resemble the earth at the period when the latter was destitute
as yet of an atmosphere? What kind of spectacle would its hidden
hemisphere present to our terrestrial spheroid? Granting that
the question at present was simply that of sending a projectile
up to the moon, every one must see that that involved the
commencement of a series of experiments. All must hope that
some day America would penetrate the deepest secrets of that
mysterious orb; and some even seemed to fear lest its conquest
should not sensibly derange the equilibrium of Europe.

The project once under discussion, not a single paragraph