“Did you go with the mail carrier, father?”
“No. He was not going to the place for which we were bound. But he told us that just behind the spur of the mountain we would find an Indian village. And there we rested for a day and refreshed ourselves, and filled our provision bags, and procured a guide to the road we wished to take. The rest of my journey was made in safety.”
“But, father, I don’t think that was a tropical snow-storm, when it happened in so cold a place. I always think of tropic as meaning hot.”
“It was a tropical snow-storm George, certainly, for we were in the tropics, only a few degrees south of the equator. The weather was cold because we were so high up in the air.”
HOW THREE MEN WENT TO THE MOON.
That is, how it is said that they went to the moon. That no man ever did go is very certain, and that no one ever will go, is very probable, but true as these statements are, they did not prevent a Frenchman from writing a story about a trip to the moon, undertaken by two Americans, and one Frenchman.
I cannot tell you all this story, but I can give you a few of the incidents that occurred during the journey, and although these are purely imaginary, they are very interesting and amusing. If any one ever had made this journey he would probably have gone as these three people went in the story. Everything is described as minutely and carefully as if it had really happened.
The journey was made in an immense, hollow cannon ball, or rather a cylindrical shot, which was fired out of a great cannon, nine hundred feet long!
This cannon, which was pointed directly at the spot where the moon would be by the time the ball had time to reach it, was planted in the earth in Florida, where thousands of people congregated to see it fired off.
When the great load of gun-cotton was touched off by means of an electrical battery, there was a tremendous explosion, and away went the great hollow projectile, with the three travelers inside, directly towards the moon.