ot even by lightening it, as a heavily laden ship is lightened, by
throwing cargo overboard?"

"What can we throw overboard? We have no ballast like balloon-men."

"I should like to know," interrupted M'Nicholl, "what would be the good
of throwing anything at all overboard. Any one with a particle of common
sense in his head, can see that the lightened Projectile should only
move the quicker!"

"Slower, you mean," said Ardan.

"Quicker, I mean," replied the Captain.

"Neither quicker nor slower, dear friends," interposed Barbican,
desirous to stop a quarrel; "we are floating, you know, in an absolute
void, where specific gravity never counts."

"Well then, my friends," said Ardan in a resigned tone that he evidently
endeavored to render calm, "since the worst is come to the worst, there
is but one thing left for us to do!"

"What's that?" said the Captain, getting ready to combat some new piece
of nonsense.

"To take our breakfast!" said the Frenchman curtly.

It was a resource he had often fallen back on in difficult
conjunctures. Nor did it fail him now.

Though it was not a project that claimed to affect either the velocity
or the direction of the Projectile, still, as it was eminently
practicable and not only unattended by no inconvenience on the one hand
but evidently fraught with many advantages on the other, it met with
decided and instantaneous success. It was rather an early hour for
breakfast, two o'clock in the morning, yet the meal was keenly relished.
Ardan served it up in charming style and crowned the dessert with a few
bottles of a wine especially selected for the occasion from his own
private stock. It was a _Tokay Imperial_ of 1863, the genuine _Essenz_,
from Prince Esterhazy's own wine cellar, and the best brain stimulant
and brain clearer in the world, as every connoisseur knows.

It was near four o'clock in the morning when our travellers, now well
fortified physically and morally, once more resumed their observations
with renewed courage and determination, and with a system of recording
really perfect in its arrangements.

Around the Projectile, they could still see floating most of the objects
that had been dropped out of the window. This convinced them that,
during their revolution around the Moon, they had not passed through any
atmosphere; had anything of the kind been encountered, it would have
revealed its presence by its retarding effect on the different objects
that now follo