heric current, after throwing over huts and cabins, uprooting
trees within a radius of twenty miles, throwing the trains off the
railway as far as Tampa, burst upon the town like an avalanche and
destroyed a hundred houses, amongst others the church of St. Mary and
the new edifice of the Exchange. Some of the vessels in the port were
run against each other and sunk, and ten of them were stranded high and
dry after breaking their chains like threads of cotton.

But the circle of these devastations extended farther still, and beyond
the limits of the United States. The recoil, aided by the westerly
winds, was felt on the Atlantic at more than 300 miles from the American
shores. An unexpected tempest, which even Admiral Fitzroy could not have
foreseen, broke upon the ships with unheard-of violence. Several
vessels, seized by a sort of whirlwind before they had time to furl
their sails, were sunk, amongst others the _Childe Harold_, of
Liverpool, a regrettable catastrophe which was the object of lively
recriminations.

Lastly--although the fact is not warranted except by the affirmation of
a few natives--half-an-hour after the departure of the projectile the
inhabitants of Sierra-Leone pretended that they heard a dull noise, the
last displacement of the sonorous waves, which, after crossing the
Atlantic, died away on the African coast.

But to return to Florida. The tumult once lessened, the wounded and
deaf--in short, all the crowd--rose and shouted in a sort of frenzy,
"Hurrah for Ardan! Hurrah for Barbicane! Hurrah for Nicholl!" Several
millions of men, nose in air, armed with telescopes and every species of
field-glass, looked into space, forgetting contusions and feelings, in
order to look at the projectile. But they sought in vain; it was not to
be seen, and they resolved to await the telegrams from Long's Peak. The
director of the Cambridge Observatory, M. Belfast, was at his post in
the Rocky Mountains, and it was to this skilful and persevering
astronomer that the observations had been entrusted.

But an unforeseen phenomenon, against which nothing could be done, soon
came to put public impatience to a rude test.

The weather, so fine before, suddenly changed; the sky became covered
with clouds. It could not be otherwise after so great a displacement of
the atmospheric strata and the dispersion of the enormous quantity of
gases from the combustion of 200,000 lbs. of pyroxyle. All natural order
had been disturb