But he had scarcely looked at it, when he uttered a cry, and the glass almost fell from his hands.
Immediately running to the room in which Cyrus Harding then was, he extended the negative and magnifier towards the engineer, pointing out the little spot.
Harding examined it; then seizing his telescope he rushed to the window.
The telescope, after having slowly swept the horizon, at last stopped on the looked-for spot, and Cyrus Harding, lowering it, pronounced one word only,—
“A vessel!”
And in fact a vessel was in sight, off Lincoln Island!