bove the horizon. Now from Massachusetts to Michigan, from
New Hampshire to Columbia, the distance is too great for this double
observation, made at the same moment, to be considered possible.

Dudley at Albany, in the state of New York, and West Point, the
military academy, showed that their colleagues were wrong by an
elaborate calculation of the right ascension and declination of the
aforesaid body.

But later on it was discovered that the observers had been deceived
in the body, and that what they had seen was an aerolite. This
aerolite could not be the object in question, for how could an
aerolite blow a trumpet?

It was in vain that they tried to get rid of this trumpet as an
optical illusion. The ears were no more deceived than the eyes.
Something had assuredly been seen, and something had assuredly been
heard. In the night of the 12th and 13th of May--a very dark night--the
observers at Yale College, in the Sheffield Science School, had
been able to take down a few bars of a musical phrase in D major,
common time, which gave note for note, rhythm for rhythm, the chorus
of the Chant du Depart.

"Good," said the Yankee wags. "There is a French band well up in the
air."

"But to joke is not to answer." Thus said the observatory at Boston,
founded by the Atlantic Iron Works Society, whose opinions in matters
of astronomy and meteorology began to have much weight in the world
of science.

Then there intervened the observatory at Cincinnati, founded in 1870,
on Mount Lookout, thanks to the generosity of Mr. Kilgour, and known
for its micrometrical measurements of double stars. Its director
declared with the utmost good faith that there had certainly been
something, that a traveling body had shown itself at very short
periods at different points in the atmosphere, but what were the
nature of this body, its dimensions, its speed, and its trajectory,
it was impossible to say.

It was then a journal whose publicity is immense--the "New York
Herald"--received the anonymous contribution hereunder.

"There will be in the recollection of most people the rivalry which
existed a few years ago between the two heirs of the Begum of
Ragginahra, the French doctor Sarrasin, the city of Frankville, and
the German engineer Schultze, in the city of Steeltown, both in the
south of Oregon in the United States.

"It will not have been forgotten that, with the object of destroying
Frankville, Herr Schultze launched a formidabl