Owing to the difference in longitude, the people of Europe could not hear it till after midnight.
But next morning the astounding issue of the great American enterprise fell on them like a thunder clap.
We must, of course, decline all attempts at describing the effects of this most unexpected intelligence on the world at large.
The Secretary of the Navy immediately telegraphed directions to the _Susquehanna_ to keep a full head of steam up night and day so as to be ready to give instant execution to orders received at any moment.
The Observatory authorities at Cambridge held a special meeting that very evening, where, with all the serene calmness so characteristic of learned societies, they discussed the scientific points of the question in all its bearings.

But, before committing themselves to any decided opinion, they unanimously resolved to wait for the development of further details.
At the rooms of the Gun Club in Baltimore there was a terrible time.

The kind reader no doubt remembers the nature of the dispatch sent one day previously by Professor Belfast from the Long's Peak observatory, announcing that the Projectile had been seen but that it had become the Moon's satellite, destined to revolve around her forever and ever till time should be no more.

The reader is also kindly aware by this time that such dispatch was not supported by the slightest foundations in fact.

The learned Professor, in a moment of temporary cerebral excitation, to which even the greatest scientist is just as liable as the rest of us, had taken some little meteor or, still more probably, some little fly-speck in the telescope for the Projectile.