wed close in the wake of the Projectile. One or two that
were missing had been probably struck and carried off by a fragment of
the exploded bolide.

Of the Earth nothing as yet could be seen. She was only one day Old,
having been New the previous evening, and two days were still to elapse
before her crescent would be sufficiently cleared of the solar rays to
be capable of performing her ordinary duty of serving as a time-piece
for the Selenites. For, as the reflecting reader need hardly be
reminded, since she rotates with perfect regularity on her axis, she can
make such rotations visible to the Selenites by bringing some particular
point on her surface once every twenty-four hours directly over the same
lunar meridian.

Towards the Moon, the view though far less distinct, was still almost as
dazzling as ever. The radiant Queen of Night still glittered in all her
splendor in the midst of the starry host, whose pure white light seemed
to borrow only additional purity and silvery whiteness from the gorgeous
contrast. On her disc, the "seas" were already beginning to assume the
ashy tint so well known to us on Earth, but the rest of her surface
sparkled with all its former radiation, _Tycho_ glowing like a sun in
the midst of the general resplendescence.

Barbican attempted in vain to obtain even a tolerable approximation of
the velocity at which the Projectile was now moving. He had to content
himself with the knowledge that it was diminishing at a uniform rate--of
which indeed a little reflection on a well known law of Dynamics readily
convinced him. He had not much difficulty even in explaining the matter
to his friends.

"Once admitting," said he, "the Projectile to describe an orbit round
the Moon, that orbit must of necessity be an ellipse. Every moving body
circulating regularly around another, describes an ellipse. Science has
proved this incontestably. The satellites describe ellipses around the
planets, the planets around the Sun, the Sun himself describes an
ellipse around the unknown star that serves as a pivot for our whole
solar system. How can our Baltimore Gun Club Projectile then escape the
universal law?

"Now what is the consequence of this law? If the orbit were a _circle_,
the satellite would always preserve the same distance from its primary,
and its velocity should therefore be constant. But the orbit being an
_ellipse_, and the attracting body always occupying one of the foci, the
satellite m