Page:Around the World in Eighty Days (1873, Towle).pdf/24

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did not saunter about Broadway, looking in shop-windows, but took the railway and went six hundred leagues to see Niagara Falls, of which he cannot yet speak without emotion.

Verne is overwhelmed with requests from dramatists to be permitted to dramatize his works. He is not disinclined to yield to their wishes, and has shown me some very original ideas in regard to scenery, which seem likely to enrich the managers, who may choose to put some hundreds of thousands of francs at the service of his labours, by millions. He has nearly finished, with Cadol, and "Around the World," and proposes to substitute for the ordinary drop-curtain a planisphere, on which a luminous trail shall mark between each act the road gone over by the heroes in their tour across the four quarters of the globe. He is also preparing "The Marvels of Science," a great piece of mechanism, which will borrow its effect, not only from painting, velvet, and the ballet, but from the dynamic agents of physics, chemistry, and mechanics. But I must stop. I might write a volume about this eloquent, witty, affable, and sympathetic man, whose biography may, however, be included in these words: "A Breton, a Catholic, and a sailor."