Midnight had just struck, and the enthusiasm did not diminish; it was kept up in equal doses in all classes of the population; magistrates, savants, merchants, tradesmen, street-porters, intelligent as well as “green” men were moved even in their most delicate fibres.  It was a national enterprise; the high town, low town, the quays bathed by the waters of the Patapsco, the ships, imprisoned in their docks, overflowed with crowds intoxicated with joy, gin, and whisky; everybody talked, argued, perorated, disputed, approved, and applauded, from the gentleman comfortably stretched on the bar-room couch before his glass of “sherry-cobbler” to the waterman who got drunk upon “knock-me-down” in the dark taverns of Fell’s Point.

However, about 2 a.m. the emotion became calmer.  President Barbicane succeeded in getting home almost knocked to pieces.  A Hercules could not have resisted such enthusiasm.  The crowd gradually abandoned the squares and streets.  The four railroads of Ohio, Susquehanna, Philadelphia, and Washington, which converge at Baltimore, took the heterogeneous population to the four corners of the United States, and the town reposed in a relative tranquillity.

It would be an error to believe that during this memorable evening Baltimore alone was agitated.  The large towns of the Union, New York, Boston, Albany, Washington, Richmond, New Orleans, Charlestown, La Mobile of Texas, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Florida, all shared in the delirium.  The thirty thousand correspondents of the Gun Club were acquainted with their president’s letter, and awaited with equal impatience the famous communication of the 5th of October.  The same evening as the orator uttered his speech it ran along the telegraph wires, across the states of the Union, with a speed of 348,447 miles a second.  It may, therefore, be said with absolute certainty that at the same moment the United States of America, ten times as large as France, cheered with a single voice, and twenty-five millions of hearts, swollen with pride, beat with the same pulsation.

The next day five hundred daily, weekly, monthly, or bi-monthly newspapers took up the question; they examined it under its different aspects—­physical, meteorological, economical, or moral, from a political or social point of view.  They debated whether the moon was a finished world, or if she was not still undergoing transformation.  Did she resemble the earth in the time when the atmosphere did not yet exist?  What kind of spectacle would her hidden hemisphere present to our terrestrial spheroid?  Granting that the question at present was simply about sending a projectile to the Queen of Night, every one saw in that the starting-point of a series of experiments; all hoped that one day America would penetrate the last secrets of the mysterious orb, and some even seemed to fear that her conquest would disturb the balance of power in Europe.