elled upon the powerful proportions of a 32-inch
mortar; it was pointed at an angle of 90 degs., and hung upon trunnions
so that the president could use it as a rocking-chair, very agreeable in
great heat. Upon the desk, a huge iron plate, supported upon six
carronades, stood a very tasteful inkstand, made of a beautifully-chased
Spanish piece, and a report-bell, which, when required, went off like a
revolver. During the vehement discussions this new sort of bell scarcely
sufficed to cover the voices of this legion of excited artillerymen.

In front of the desk, benches, arranged in zigzags, like the
circumvallations of intrenchment, formed a succession of bastions and
curtains where the members of the Gun Club took their seats; and that
evening, it may be said, there were plenty on the ramparts. The
president was sufficiently known for all to be assured that he would not
have called together his colleagues without a very great motive.

Impey Barbicane was a man of forty, calm, cold, austere, of a singularly
serious and concentrated mind, as exact as a chronometer, of an
imperturbable temperament and immovable character; not very chivalrous,
yet adventurous, and always bringing practical ideas to bear on the
wildest enterprises; an essential New-Englander, a Northern colonist,
the descendant of those Roundheads so fatal to the Stuarts, and the
implacable enemy of the Southern gentlemen, the ancient cavaliers of the
mother country--in a word, a Yankee cast in a single mould.

Barbicane had made a great fortune as a timber-merchant; named director
of artillery during the war, he showed himself fertile in inventions;
enterprising in his ideas, he contributed powerfully to the progress of
ballistics, gave an immense impetus to experimental researches.

He was a person of average height, having, by a rare exception in the
Gun Club, all his limbs intact. His strongly-marked features seemed to
be drawn by square and rule, and if it be true that in order to guess
the instincts of a man one must look at his profile, Barbicane seen
thus offered the most certain indications of energy, audacity, and
_sang-froid_.

At that moment he remained motionless in his chair, mute, absorbed, with
an inward look sheltered under his tall hat, a cylinder of black silk,
which seems screwed down upon the skull of American men.

His colleagues talked noisily around him without disturbing him; they
questioned one another, launched into the fiel