“Wilberforce, you are wrong; he only offered to bet fifty dollars,” said Mrs. Fogg.

“Well, anyhow, Bradley took him up quicker’n a wink, and they agreed to send up a cat in a balloon to decide the bet.  So what does Bradley do but buy a balloon about twice as big as our barn and begin to—­”

“It was only about ten feet in diameter, Mr. Adeler; Wilberforce forgets.”

“—­Begin to inflate her.  When she was filled, it took eighty men to hold her; and—­”

“Eighty men, Mr. Fogg!” said Mrs. F.  “Why, you know Mr. Bradley held the balloon himself.”

“He did, did he?  Oh, very well; what’s the odds?  And when everything was ready, they brought out Bradley’s tomcat and put it in the basket and tied it in, so it couldn’t jump, you know.  There were about one hundred thousand people looking on; and when they let go, you never heard such—­”

“There was not one more than two hundred people there,” said Mrs. Fogg; “I counted them myself.”

“Oh, don’t bother me!—­I say, you never heard such a yell as the balloon went scooting up into the sky, pretty near out of sight.  Bradley said she went up about one thousand miles, and—­now, don’t interrupt me, Maria; I know what the man said—­and that cat, mind you, howling like a hundred fog-horns, so’s you could a heard her from here to Peru.  Well, sir, when she was up so’s she looked as small as a pin-head something or other burst.  I dunno know how it was, but pretty soon down came that balloon, a-hurtling toward the earth at the rate of fifty miles a minute, and old—­”

“Mr. Fogg, you know that the balloon came down as gently as—­”

“Oh, do hush up!  Women don’t know anything about such things.—­And old Bradley, he had a kind of registering thermometer fixed in the basket along with that cat—­some sort of a patent machine; cost thousands of dollars—­and he was expecting to examine it; and Green had an idea he’d lift out a dead cat and take in the stakes.  When all of a sudden, as she came pelting down, a tornado struck her—­now, Maria, what in the thunder are you staring at me in that way for?  It was a tornado—­a regular cyclone—­and it struck her and jammed her against the lightning-rod on the Baptist church-steeple; and there she stuck—­stuck on that spire about eight hundred feet up in the air, and looked as if she had come there to stay.”

“You may get just as mad as you like,” said Mrs. Fogg, “but I am positively certain that steeple’s not an inch over ninety-five feet.”

“Maria, I wish to gracious you’d go up stairs and look after the children.—­Well, about half a minute after she struck out stepped that tomcat onto the weathercock.  It made Green sick.  And just then the hurricane reached the weathercock, and it began to revolve six hundred or seven hundred times a minute, the cat howling until you couldn’t hear yourself speak.—­Now, Maria, you’ve had your put; you keep quiet.—­That cat stayed on the weathercock about two months—­”