Different, indeed, was the home of Mrs. Scorbitt, in the fashionable quarter of New Park, with the balconies on its front covered with the fantastic sculpture of American architecture, Gothic and Renascence jumbled together; its enormous hall, its picture galleries, its double twisted staircase, its numerous domestics, its stables, its coach-houses, its gardens, its lawns, its trees, its fountains, and the tower which dominated its battlements from the summit of which fluttered in the breeze the blue and gold banner of the Scorbitts.
Three miles divided New Park from Ballistic Cottage. But a telephone-wire united the two habitations, and at the ringing of the call between the mansion and the cottage conversation could be instantly established. If the talkers could not see each other, they could hear each other; and no one will be surprised to learn that Evangelina Scorbitt called J. T. Maston much oftener before his telephonic plate than J. T. Maston called Evangelina Scorbitt before hers. The mathematician would leave his work, not without some disgust, to receive a friendly “good morning,” and he would reply by a growl along the wire, which he hoped would soften as it went, and then he would return to his problems.
It was on the 3rd of October, after a last and long conference, that J. T. Maston took leave of his colleagues to devote himself to his task. It was the most important investigation he had undertaken. He had to calculate the mechanical formulæ required for the advance on the Pole, and the economical working of the coal-beds thereof. He estimated that it would take him rather more than a week to accomplish this mysterious task. It was a complicated and delicate inquiry, necessitating the resolution of a large number of equations dealing with mechanics, analytical geometry of the three dimensions, and spherical trigonometry.
To be free from trouble, it had been arranged that the secretary of the Gun Club should retire to his cottage, and be visited and disturbed by no one. This was a great trial for Mrs. Scorbitt, but she had to resign herself to it. She and President Barbicane, Captain Nicholl, the brisk Bilsby, Colonel Bloomsberry, and Tom Hunter with his wooden legs, had called on Maston in the afternoon to bid him farewell for a time.
“You will succeed, dear Maston,” she said, as she rose to go.
“But be sure you don’t make a mistake,” said Barbicane, with a smile.
“A mistake! He!” exclaimed Mrs. Scorbitt, with horror at the thought.
With a grip of the hand from some, a sigh from one, wishes for success, and recommendations not to overwork himself from others, the mathematician saw his friends depart. The door of Ballistic Cottage was shut, and Fire-Fire received orders to open it to no one—not even to the President of the United States of America.
For the first two days of his seclusion J. T. Maston thought over the problem without touching the chalk. He read over certain works relative to the elements, the earth, its mass, its density, its volume, its form, its rotation on its axis, and translation round its orbit—elements which were to form the bases of his calculations.
These are the principal, which it is as well the reader should have before him:—