Besides, what is easier?
Is not the Columbiad still at Stony Hill?
Cannot gun-cotton be readily manufactured on any occasion?
Will not the Moon again pass through the zenith of Florida?
Eighteen years from now, will she not occupy exactly the same spot that she does to-day ?" "Certainly!" cried Ardan, with increasing enthusiasm, "Marston will come! and Elphinstone of the torpedo! and the gallant Bloomsbury, and Billsby the brave, and all our friends of the Baltimore Gun Club! And we shall receive them with all the honors! And then we shall establish projectile trains between the Earth and the Moon! Hurrah for J.T.
Marston!" "Hurrah for Secretary Marston!" cried the Captain, with an enthusiasm almost equal to Ardan's.
"Hurrah for my dear friend Marston!" cried Barbican, hardly less excited than his comrades.
Our old acquaintance, Marston, of course could not have heard the joyous acclamations that welcomed his name, but at that moment he certainly must have felt his ears most unaccountably tingling.

What was he doing at the time?
He was rattling along the banks of the Kansas River, as fast as an express train could take him, on the road to Long's Peak, where, by means of the great Telescope, he expected to find some traces of the Projectile that contained his friends.

He never forgot them for a moment, but of course he little dreamed that his name at that very time was exciting their vividest recollections and their warmest applause.
In fact, their recollections were rather too vivid, and their applause decidedly too warm.

Was not the animation that prevailed among the guests of the Projectile of a very unusual character, and was it not becoming more and more violent every moment?
Could the wine have caused it?
No; though not teetotallers, they never drank to excess.

Could the Moon's proximity, shedding her subtle, mysterious influence over their nervous systems, have stimulated them to a degree that was threatening to border on frenzy?
Their faces were as red as if they were standing before a hot fire; their breathing was loud, and their lungs heaved like a smith's bellows; their eyes blazed like burning coals; their voices sounded as loud and harsh as that of a stump speaker trying to make himself heard by an inattentive or hostile crowd; their words popped from their lips like corks from Champagne bottles; their gesticulating became wilder and in fact more alarming--considering the little room left in the Projectile for muscular displays of any kind.
But the most extraordinary part of the whole phenomenon was that neither of them, not even Barbican, had the slightest consciousness of any strange or unusual ebullition of spirits either on his own part or on that of the others.
"See here, gentlemen!" said the Captain in a quick imperious manner--the roughness of his old life on the Mississippi would still break out--"See here, gentlemen! It seems I'm not to know if we are to return from the Moon.