“Are you sure?”

“Certain.  I have taken in a supply of Matinees, and a stock of Five-act Tragedies.”

“Good.  But how to raise the wind?”

Scarcely, had the question been asked, when a frightful explosion shook the iceberg to its foundations.  The Doctor rushed to the gasbag.  It was empty.  He frowned.  Lord John was smoking his pipe; the Colonel was turning over the pages of an old Algebra.  He muttered to himself, “That ought to figure it out.  If x = the amount of non-compressible fluid consumed by a given labourer in y days, find, by the substitution of poached eggs for kippered herrings, how many tea-cups it will take to make a transpontine hurricane.  Yes,” he went on, “that’s it.  Yes, Sirree.”  And at these words the vast mass of congealed water rose majestically out of the ocean, and floated off into the nebular hypothesis.  But the Philosopher had vanished.

CHAPTER III.

When the explosion narrated in the last chapter took place, the Philosopher had been looking out of the window.  The shock had hurled him with the speed of a pirate ’bus through the air.  Soon he became a speck.  Shortly afterwards he reached a point in his flight situated exactly 40,000 miles over a London publisher’s office.  There was a short contest.  Centrifugal and centripetal fought for the mastery, and the latter was victorious.  The publisher was at home.  The novel was accepted, and the Philosopher started to rejoin his comrades lost in the boundless tracts of space.

CHAPTER IV.

“My faith,” said Lord John, “I am getting tired of this.  Shall we never reach the Sun?”

“Courage, my friend,” was the well-known reply of the brave little Doctor.  “We deviated from our course one hair’s-breadth on the twelfth day.  This is the fortieth day, and by the formula for the precession of the equinoxes, squared by the parallelogram of an ellipsoidal bath-bun fresh from the glass cylinder of a refreshment bar, we find that we are now travelling in a perpetual circle at a distance of one billion marine gasmeters from the Sun.  I have now accounted for the milk in the cocoa-nut.”

“But not,” said the Philosopher, as he popped up through a concealed trap-door, “for the hair outside.  That remains for another volume.”  With that, he rang a gong.  The iceberg splintered into a thousand pieces.  The voyagers were each hurled violently down into their respective countries, where a savage public was waiting to devour them.

* * * * *

Tolstoi on tobacco.

    [Count Tolstoi has been declaiming against Tobacco in
    The Contemporary Review, and this in no way exaggerates
    his views.]

  Tolstoi fuming, in a pet,
  Raves against the cigarette;
  Says it’s bad at any time,
  Leads to every kind of crime;
  And the man who smokes, quoth he,
  Is as wicked as can be.