At this moment a perfect howling was heard; it was the brave J. T. Maston who had just fallen all in a heap. Forgetting on the one hand that his right arm had been replaced by an iron hook, and on the other that a simple gutta-percha cap covered his brain-box, he had given himself a formidable blow.
They hurried toward him, picked him up, restored him to life. And what were his first words?
“Ah! trebly brutes! quadruply idiots! quintuply boobies that we are!”
“What is it?” exclaimed everyone around him.
“What is it?”
“Come, speak!”
“It is, simpletons,” howled the terrible secretary, “it is that the projectile only weighs 19,250 pounds!”
“Well?”
“And that it displaces twenty-eight tons, or in other words 56,000 pounds, and that consequently it floats!”
Ah! what stress the worthy man had laid on the verb “float!” And it was true! All, yes! all these savants had forgotten this fundamental law, namely, that on account of its specific lightness, the projectile, after having been drawn by its fall to the greatest depths of the ocean, must naturally return to the surface. And now it was floating quietly at the mercy of the waves.