For George had stopped, and seen Brannan ; and Brannan had not forgot- ten. Seventeen years Brannan had re- membered, and not a ship had been lost on a lee-shore because her longi- tude was wrong, not a baby had wailed its last as it was ground between wrecked spar and cruel rock, not a swollen corpse unknown had been flung up upon the sand, and been buried with a nameless epitaph, but Brannan had recollected the Brick Moon, and had, in the memory-chamber which rejected nothing, stored away the story of the horror. And now, George was ready to consecrate a round hundred thou- sand to the building of the Moon ; and Brannan was ready in the thousand ways in which wise men move the people to and fro, to persuade them to give to us a hundred thousand more ; and George had come to ask me if I were not ready to undertake .with them the final great effort, of which our old calculations were the embryo. For this I was now to contribute the mathematical cer- tainty and the lore borrowed from na- val science, which should blossom and bear fruit, when the Brick Moon was snapped like a cherry from the way on which it was built, was launched into the air by power gathered from a thou- sand freshets, and, poised at Ifist in its own pre- calculated region of the ether, should begin its course of eternal blessings in one unchanging merid- ian !
Vision of Beneficence and Wonder ! Of course I consented.
O, that you were not so eager for the end ! O, that I might tell you, what now you will never know, of the great campaign which we then and there inaugurated ! How the horrible loss of the Royal Martyr, whose longitude was three degrees awry, startled the whole world, and gave us a point to start from. How I explained to George that he must not subscribe the one hundred thousand dollars in a moment. It must come in bits, when " the cause " needed a stimulus, or the public needed encouragement. How we caught neo- phyte editors, and explained to them enough to make them think the Moon was wellnigh their own invention and their own thunder. How, beginning in Boston, we sent round to all the men of science, all those of philanthropy, and all those of commerce, three thousand circulars, inviting them to a private meeting at George's parlors at the Re- vere. How, besides ourselves, and some nice, respectable-looking old gen- tlemen Brannan had brought over from Podunk with him, paying their fares both ways, there were present only three men, all adventurers whose pro- jects had failed, besides the represen- tatives of the press. How, of these representatives, some understood the whole, and some understood nothing. How, the next day, all gave us " first- rate notices." How, a few days after, in the lower Horticultural Hall, we had our first public meeting. How Haliburton brought us fifty people who loved him, his Bible class, most of them, to help fill up ; how, besides these, there were not three persons whom we had not asked personally, or one who could in- vent an excuse to -stay away. How we had hung the walls with intelligible and unintelligible'diagrams. How I opened the meeting. Of that meeting, indeed, I must tell something.
First, I spoke. I did not pretend to unfold the scheme. I did not attempt any rhetoric. But I did not make any apologies. I told them simply of the dangers of lee-shores. I told them when they were most dangerous, when seamen came upon them una- wares. I explained to them that, though the costly chronometer, frequently ad- justed, made a delusive guide to the voyager who often made a harbor, still the adjustment was treacherous, the instrument beyond the use of the poor, and that, once astray, its error increased forever. I said that we be- lieved we had a method which, if the means were supplied for the experiment, would give the humblest fisherman the very certainty of sunrise and of sunset in his calculations of his place upon the world. And I said that whenever a man knew his place in this world, it
