man armed _cap-a-pie_ come
out of it. We shall be like feudal lords in there; with a little
artillery we could hold our own against a whole army of Selenites--that
is, if there are any in the moon!"

"Then the vehicle pleases you?" asked Barbicane.

"Yes, yes! certainly," answered Michel Ardan, who was examining it as an
artist. "I only regret that its form is not a little more slender, its
cone more graceful; it ought to be terminated by a metal group, some
Gothic ornament, a salamander escaping from it with outspread wings and
open beak."

"What would be the use?" said Barbicane, whose positive mind was little
sensitive to the beauties of art.

"Ah, friend Barbicane, I am afraid you will never understand the use, or
you would not ask!"

"Well, tell me, at all events, my brave companion."

"Well, my friend, I think we ought always to put a little art in all we
do. Do you know an Indian play called _The Child's Chariot_?"

"Not even by name," answered Barbicane.

"I am not surprised at that," continued Michel Ardan. "Learn, then, that
in that play there is a robber who, when in the act of piercing the wall
of a house, stops to consider whether he shall make his hole in the
shape of a lyre, a flower, or a bird. Well, tell me, friend Barbicane,
if at that epoch you had been his judge would you have condemned that
robber?"

"Without hesitation," answered the president of the Gun Club, "and as a
burglar too."

"Well, I should have acquitted him, friend Barbicane. That is why you
could never understand me."

"I will not even try, my valiant artist."

"But, at least," continued Michel Ardan, "as the exterior of our
projectile compartment leaves much to be desired, I shall be allowed to
furnish the inside as I choose, and with all luxury suitable to
ambassadors from the earth."

"About that, my brave Michel," answered Barbicane, "you can do entirely
as you please."

But before passing to the agreeable the president of the Gun Club had
thought of the useful, and the means he had invented for lessening the
effects of the shock were applied with perfect intelligence.

Barbicane had said to himself, not unreasonably, that no spring would be
sufficiently powerful to deaden the shock, and during his famous
promenade in Skersnaw Wood he had ended by solving this great difficulty
in an ingenious fashion. He depended upon water to render him this
signal service. This is how:--

The projectile was to be filled to