As we meant to return in the same machine in which we came, we were not long in preparing for our voyage.  We proposed to set out about the middle of the night; and we passed the chief part of the interval in making visits of ceremony, and in calling on those who had shown us civility.  I endeavoured also, to collect such articles as I thought would be most curious and rare in my own country, and most likely to produce conviction with those who might be disposed to question the fact of my voyage.  I was obliged, however, to limit myself to such things as were neither bulky nor weighty, the Brahmin thinking that after we had taken in our instruments and the necessary provisions, we could not safely take more than twenty or thirty pounds in addition.

Some of my lunar curiosities, which I thought would be most new and interesting to my countrymen, have proved to be very familiar to our men of science.  This has been most remarkably the case with my mineral specimens.  Of the leaves and flowers of above seventy plants, which I brought, more than forty are found on the earth, and several of these grow in my native State.  With the insects I have been more successful; but some of these, as well as of the plants, I am assured, are found on the coasts of the Pacific, or in the islands of that ocean; which fact, by the way, gives a farther support to the Brahmin’s hypothesis.

Besides the productions of nature that I have mentioned, I procured some specimens of their cloth, a few light toys, a lady’s turban decorated with cantharides, a pair of slippers with heavy metallic soles, which are used there for walking in a strong wind, and by the dancing girls to prevent their jumping too high.  As this metal, which gravitates to the moon, is repelled from the earth, these slippers assist the wearer here in springing from the ground as much as they impeded it in the moon, and therefore I have lent them to Madame ——­, of the New-York Theatre, who is thus enabled to astonish and delight the spectators with her wonderful lightness and agility.

But there is nothing that I have brought which I prize so highly as a few of their manuscripts.  The Lunarians write as we do, from left to right; but when their words consist of more than one syllable, all the subsequent syllables are put over the first, so that what we call long words, they call high ones:  which mode of writing makes them more striking to the eye.  This peculiarity has, perhaps, had some effect in giving their writers a magniloquence of style, something like that which so laudably characterises our Fourth of July Orations and Funeral Panegyrics:  that composition being thought the finest in which the words stand highest.  Another advantage of this mode of writing is, that they can crowd more in a small page, so that a long discourse, if it is also very eloquent, may be compressed in a single page.  I have left some of the manuscripts with the publisher of this work, for the gratification of the public curiosity.