"By the bye, doctor," said Castleton, evidently impatient at his
enforced silence whilst another spoke, "do any of your volcanoes or
mountains in Hili-li blow up?"

"No, sir," answered Bainbridge, with dignity.

"Well, if I had been Pym I should have blown those mountains into the
Antarctic Ocean," said Castleton. "I understand from the words that I
caught this evening as I entered here that your heroine is safe; but if
I had been Pym, I should have taken no risks. I should have sent your
madman word to return the girl, or take the consequences--the
consequences being that I should have blown him and the entire mountain
into the mighty deep. 'Sir,' I should have said, 'return the lady, or I
will annihilate you.' And so I should have done, if a hair of her head
had been harmed.--By the bye, gentlemen, I believe you never heard of my
invention for stopping war, did you?" We intimated that we had thus far
been deprived of that pleasure. I saw that one of his peculiar outbursts
was at hand--one of those apparently serious, though, I thought,
intentionally humorous sallies, so puzzling coming from a man of
Castleton's intellectual attainments, and the mental _primum mobile_ of
which I had already been much interested in trying to determine.

"Well, gentlemen," he continued, "it was about fourteen years ago,
during the dark days of The War"--he referred to the great rebellion in
the United States, which began in 1861, and which it required the
existing government about four years to suppress. "It was during the
period when our great President was most worried. I had thought the
matter over--as I always do think over vast questions, from the
standpoint of true greatness. 'Why not,' I mentally soliloquized, 'why
not end this matter at a blow? 'As I drove about through our retired