They instantly obeyed, all quietly yielding them a passage.
The vessel was now only about a quarter of a mile distant from the object and therefore near enough to allow it to be distinguished without the aid of a glass.
What! The flag bore the well known Stars and Stripes! An electric shudder of glad surprise shot through the assembled crowd.
They still spoke, however, in whispers, hardly daring to utter their thoughts aloud.
The silence was suddenly startled by a howl of mingled ecstasy and rage from Marston.
He would have fallen off the bridge, had not the others held him firmly.
Then he burst into a laugh loud and long, and quite as formidable as his howl.
Then he tore away from his friends, and began beating himself over the head.
"Oh!" he cried in accents between a yell and a groan, "what chuckleheads we are! What numskulls! What jackasses! What double-treble-barrelled gibbering idiots!" Then he fell to beating himself over the head again.
"What's the matter, Marston, for heaven's sake!" cried his friends, vainly trying to hold him.
"Speak for yourself!" cried others, Belfast among the number.
"No exception, Belfast! You're as bad as the rest of us! We're all a set of unmitigated, demoralized, dog-goned old lunatics! Ha! Ha! Ha!" "Speak plainly, Marston! Tell us what you mean!" "I mean," roared the terrible Secretary, "that we are no better than a lot of cabbage heads, dead beats, and frauds, calling ourselves scientists! O Barbican, how you must blush for us! If we were schoolboys, we should all be skinned alive for our ignorance! Do you forget, you herd of ignoramuses, that the Projectile weighs only ten tons ?" "We don't forget it! We know it well! What of it ?" "This of it: it can't sink in water without displacing its own volume in water; its own volume in water weighs thirty tons! Consequently, it can't sink; more consequently, it hasn't sunk; and, most consequently, there it is before us, bobbing up and down all the time under our very noses! O Barbican, how can we ever venture to look at you straight in the face again!" Marston's extravagant manner of showing it did not prevent him from being perfectly right.

With all their knowledge of physics, not a single one of those scientific gentlemen had remembered the great fundamental law that governs sinking or floating bodies.

Thanks to its slight specific gravity, the Projectile, after reaching unknown depths of ocean through the terrific momentum of its fall, had been at last arrested in its course and even obliged to return to the surface.
By this time, all the passengers of the _Susquehanna_ could easily recognize the object of such weary longings and desperate searches, floating quietly a short distance before them in the last rays of the declining day! The boats were out in an instant.

Marston and his friends took the Captain's gig.

The rowers pulled with a will towards the rapidly nearing Projectile.