I wonder whether Brannan ever knew that he
was eloquent. What I knew, and what dear George knew,
was, that he was one of the leaders of men!
Courage, my friends, we are steadily advancing to the
Brick Moon!
For George had stopped, and seen Brannan; and Brannan
had not forgotten. Seventeen years Brannan had
remembered, and not a ship had been lost on a lee-shore
because her longitude 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 thousand 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 certainty and the lore
borrowed from naval science, which should blossom and
bear fruit when the Brick Moon was snapped like a cherry
from the ways on which it was built, was launched into
the air by power gathered from a thousand freshets, and,
poised at last in its own pre-calculated region of the
ether, should begin its course of eternal blessings in
one unchanging meridian!
Vision of Beneficence and Wonder! Of course I
consented.
Pages:
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41