I would like you to provide a proper outfit and start north as soon as I telegraph you, be it night or be it day. I wish you to take up all the country stretching away from the north pole on all sides for many degrees south, and buy Greenland and Iceland at the best figure you can get now while they are cheap. It is my intention to move one of the tropics up there and transfer the frigid zone to the equator. I will have the entire Arctic Circle in the market as a summer resort next year, and will use the surplusage of the old climate, over and above what can be utilized on the equator, to reduce the temperature of opposition resorts. But I have said enough to give you an idea of the prodigious nature of my scheme and the feasible and enormously profitable character of it. I shall join all you happy people in England as soon as I shall have sold out some of my principal climates and arranged with the Czar about Siberia.
Meantime, watch for a sign from me. Eight days from now, we shall be wide asunder; for I shall be on the border of the Pacific, and you far out on the Atlantic, approaching England. That day, if I am alive and my sublime discovery is proved and established, I will send you greeting, and my messenger shall deliver it where you are, in the solitudes of the sea; for I will waft a vast sun-spot across the disk like drifting smoke, and you will know it for my love-sign, and will say “Mulberry Sellers throws us a kiss across the universe.”
APPENDIX.
Weather for use in this book.
Selected from the Best Authorities.
A brief though violent thunderstorm which had raged
over the city was passing away; but still, though
the rain had ceased more than an hour before, wild
piles of dark and coppery clouds, in which a fierce
and rayless glow was laboring, gigantically overhung
the grotesque and huddled vista of dwarf houses, while
in the distance, sheeting high over the low, misty
confusion of gables and chimneys, spread a pall of
dead, leprous blue, suffused with blotches of dull,
glistening yellow, and with black plague-spots of
vapor floating and faint lightnings crinkling on its
surface. Thunder, still muttering in the close
and sultry air, kept the scared dwellers in the street
within, behind their closed shutters; and all deserted,
cowed, dejected, squalid, like poor, stupid, top-heavy
things that had felt the wrath of the summer tempest,
stood the drenched structures on either side of the
narrow and crooked way, ghastly and picturesque, under
the giant canopy. Rain dripped wretchedly in
slow drops of melancholy sound from their projecting
eaves upon the broken flagging, lay there in pools
or trickled into the swollen drains, where the fallen
torrent sullenly gurgled on its way to the river.
“The
Brazen Android."-W. D. O’Connor.