It is well known that Yankees are born business men; everywhere that destiny takes them, from the glacial to the torrid zone, their instinct for business is usefully exercised.  That is why simple visitors to Florida for the sole purpose of following the operations of the Gun Club allowed themselves to be involved in commercial operations as soon as they were installed in Tampa Town.  The vessels freighted for the transport of the metal and the workmen had given unparalleled activity to the port.  Soon other vessels of every form and tonnage, freighted with provisions and merchandise, ploughed the bay and the two harbours; vast offices of shipbrokers and merchants were established in the town, and the Shipping Gazette each day published fresh arrivals in the port of Tampa.

Whilst roads were multiplied round the town, in consequence of the prodigious increase in its population and commerce, it was joined by railway to the Southern States of the Union.  One line of rails connected La Mobile to Pensacola, the great southern maritime arsenal; thence from that important point it ran to Tallahassee.  There already existed there a short line, twenty-one miles long, to Saint Marks on the seashore.  It was this loop-line that was prolonged as far as Tampa Town, awakening in its passage the dead or sleeping portions of Central Florida.  Thus Tampa, thanks to these marvels of industry due to the idea born one line day in the brain of one man, could take as its right the airs of a large town.  They surnamed it “Moon-City,” and the capital of Florida suffered an eclipse visible from all points of the globe.

Every one will now understand why the rivalry was so great between Texas and Florida, and the irritation of the Texicans when they saw their pretensions set aside by the Gun Club.  In their long-sighted sagacity they had foreseen what a country might gain from the experiment attempted by Barbicane, and the wealth that would accompany such a cannon-shot.  Texas lost a vast centre of commerce, railways, and a considerable increase of population.  All these advantages had been given to that miserable Floridian peninsula, thrown like a pier between the waves of the Gulf and those of the Atlantic Ocean.  Barbicane, therefore, divided with General Santa-Anna the Texan antipathy.

However, though given up to its commercial and industrial fury, the new population of Tampa Town took care not to forget the interesting operations of the Gun Club.  On the contrary, the least details of the enterprise, every blow of the pickaxe, interested them.  There was an incessant flow of people to and from Tampa Town to Stony Hill—­a perfect procession, or, better still, a pilgrimage.

It was already easy to foresee that the day of the experiment the concourse of spectators would be counted by millions, for they came already from all points of the earth to the narrow peninsula.  Europe was emigrating to America.