What he subsequently said regarding his automatic shell and its accidental descent through fourteen miles of the earth's crust, excited more interest and more incredulity, not entirely unexpressed.

Clewe was well known as a man of science, an inventor, an electrician of rare ability, and a person of serious purpose and strict probity, but it was possible for a man of great attainments and of the highest moral character to become a little twisted in his intellect.
When at last the speaker told of his descent into the shaft; of his passage fourteen miles into the interior of the earth; of his discoveries, on which he based his theory that the centre of our globe is one vast diamond, there was a general laugh from the reporters' quarter, and the men of science began to move uneasily in their seats and to talk to each other.

Professor Tippengray, her silver hair brushed smoothly back from her pale countenance, sat looking at the speaker through her gold spectacles, as if the rays from her bright eyes would penetrate into the very recesses of his soul.

Not an atom of doubt was in her mind; she never doubted, she believed or she disbelieved.

At present she believed; she had come there to do that, and she would wait, and when the proper time had come to disbelieve she would do so.
If there had been any disposition in the audience to considerately leave the man of shattered intellect to the care of his friends, it disappeared when Clewe said that he would now be glad to show to all present the workings of the Artesian ray.