The southward voyage of the Dipsey was an easy one and without notable incident; and at last a lookout who had been posted at the upper skylight reported light from above. This meant that they had reached open water southward of the frozen regions they had been exploring, and the great submarine voyage, the most peculiar ever made by man, was ended. Captain Jim Hubbell immediately put on a heavy pea-jacket with silver buttons, for as soon as the vessel should sail upon the surface of the sea he would be in command.

When the dripping Dipsey rose from the waters of the arctic regions, it might have been supposed that the people on board of her were emerging into a part of the world where they felt perfectly at home. Cape Tariff, to which they were bound, was a hundred miles away, and was itself a lonely spot, often inaccessible in severe weather, and they must make a long and hazardous voyage from it before they could reach their homes; but by comparison with the absolutely desolate and mysterious region they had left, any part of the world where there was a possibility of meeting with other human beings seemed familiar and homelike.

But when the Dipsey was again upon the surface of the ocean, when the light of day was shining unobstructed upon the bold form of Captain Hubbell as he strode upon the upper deck—being careful not to stand still lest his shoes should freeze fast to the planks beneath him—the party on board were not so-well satisfied as they expected to be. There was a great wind blowing, and the waves were rolling high. Not far away, on their starboard bow, a small iceberg, tossing like a disabled ship, was surging towards them, impelled by a biting blast from the east, and the sea was so high that sometimes the spray swept over the deck of the vessel, making it impossible for Captain Hubbell and the others with him to keep dry.

Still the captain kept his post and roared out his orders, still the Dipsey pressed forward against wind and wave. Her engines were strong, her electric gills were folded close to her sides, and she seemed to feel herself able to contend against the storm, and in this point she was heartily seconded by her captain.

But the other people on board soon began to have ideas of a different kind. It seemed to all of them, including the officers, that this vessel, not built to encounter very heavy weather, was in danger, and even if she should be able to successfully ride out the storm, their situation must continue to be a very unpleasant one. The Dipsey pitched and tossed and rolled and shook herself, and it was the general opinion, below decks, that the best thing for her to do would be to sink into the quiet depths below the surface, where she was perfectly at home, and proceed on her voyage to Cape Tariff in the submarine fashion to which she was accustomed.

It was some time before Captain Hubbell would consent to listen to such a proposition as this, but when a wave, carrying on its crest a lump of ice about the size of a flour barrel, threw its burden on the deck of the vessel, raking it from stem to stern, the captain, who had barely been missed by the grating missile, agreed that in a vessel with such a low rail and of such defective naval principles, it would be better perhaps to sail under the water than on top of it, and so he went below, took off his pea-jacket with the silver buttons, and retired into private life. The Dipsey then sank to a quiet depth and continued her course under water, to the great satisfaction of everybody on board.

On a fine, frosty morning, with a strong wind blowing, although the storm had subsided, the few inhabitants of the little settlement at Cape Tariff saw in the distance a flag floating over the water. The Dipsey had risen to the surface some twenty miles from the Cape and now came bravely on, Captain Hubbell on deck, his silver buttons shining in the sun. The sea was rough, but everybody was willing to bear with a little discomfort in order to be able to see the point of land which was the end of the voyage on the Dipsey, to let their eyes rest as early as possible upon a wreath of smoke arising from the habitation of human beings, and to catch sight of those human beings themselves.

As soon as the Dipscy arrived in the harbor, Sammy and most of the officers went on shore to open communication with Sardis. Sarah Block stayed on the vessel. She had been on shore when she had arrived at Cape Tariff in the Go Lightly, and her disgust with the methods of living in that part of the world had been freely expressed. So long as she had perfectly comfortable quarters on board the good ship she did not wish to visit the low huts and extremely close quarters in which dwelt the people of the little colony. Rovinski also remained on board, but not because he wanted to do so. A watch was kept upon him; but as the Dipsey was anchored some distance from the landing-place, Mr. Marcy was of the opinion that if he attempted to swim ashore it might be well to let him do so, for if he should not be benumbed in the water into which he would plunge he would certainly be frozen to death as soon as he reached the shore.

The messages which came from Sardis as soon as news had been received of the safe return of the explorers were full of hearty congratulations and friendly welcome, but they were not very long, and Sammy said to Mr. Gibbs that he thought it likely that this was one of Mr. Clewe's busy times. The latter telegraphed that he would send a vessel for them immediately, and as she was now lying at St. John's they would not have to wait very long.

The fact was that the news of the arrival of the Dipsey at Cape Tariff had come to Sardis a week after Clewe's descent into the shaft, and he was absorbed, body and soul, in his underground discoveries. He was not wanting in sympathy, or even affection, for the people who had been doing his work, and his interest in their welfare and their achievements was as great as it ever had been, but the ideas and thoughts which now occupied his mind were of a character which lessened and overshadowed every other object of consideration. Most of the messages sent to Cape Tariff had come from Margaret Raleigh.



CHAPTER XXIV

ROVINSKI COMES TO THE SURFACE

When Sammy Block and his companion explorers had journeyed from Cape Tariff to Sardis, they found Roland Clewe ready to tender a most grateful welcome, and to give full and most interested attention to the stories of their adventures and to their scientific reports. For a time he was willing to allow his own great discovery to lie fallow in his mind, and to give his whole attention to the wonderful achievement which had been made under his direction.

He had worked out his theory of the formation and present constitution of the earth; had written a full and complete report of what he had seen and done, and was ready, when he thought the proper time had arrived, to announce to the world his theories and his facts. Moreover, he had sent to several jewelers and mineralogists some of the smaller fragments which he had picked up in the cave of light, and these specialists, while reporting the material of the specimens purest diamond, expressed the greatest surprise at their shape and brilliancy. They had evidently not been ground or cut, and yet their sharp points and glittering surfaces reflected light as if they had been in the hands of a diamond-cutter. One of these experts wrote to Clewe asking him if he had been digging diamonds with a machine which broke the gems to pieces.

So the soul of Roland Clewe was satisfied; it seemed to walk the air as he himself once had trod what seemed to him a solid atmosphere. There was now nothing that his ambition might point out which would induce him to endeavor to climb higher in the field of human achievement than the spot on which he stood. From this great elevation he was perfectly willing to look down and kindly consider the heroic performances of those who had reached the pole, and who had anchored a buoy on the extreme northern point of the earth's axis.

Mr. Gibbs's reports, and those of his assistants, were well worked out, and of the greatest value to the scientific world, and every one who had made that memorable voyage on the Dipscy had stories to tell for which editors in every civilized land would have paid gold beyond all former precedent.

But Roland Clewe did not care to say anything to the world until he could say everything that he wished to say. It had been known that he had sent an expedition into Northern waters, but exactly what he intended to do had not been known, and what he had done had not been communicated even to the telegraph-operators at Cape Tariff. These had received despatches in cipher from points far away to the north, but while they transmitted them to Sardis they had no idea of their signification. When everything should be ready to satisfy the learned world, as well as the popular mind, the great discovery of the pole would be announced.

In the meantime there was a suspicion in the journalistic world that the man of inventions who lived at Sardis, New Jersey, had done something out of the common in the North. A party of people, one of them a woman, had been taken up there and left there, and they had recently been brought back. The general opinion was that Clewe had endeavored to found a settlement at some point north of Cape Tariff, probably for purposes of scientific observation, and that he had failed. The stories of these people, however, would be interesting, and several reporters made visits to Sardis. But they all saw Sammy, and not one of them considered his communications worth more than a brief paragraph.

In a week Mr. Gibbs would have finished his charts, his meteorological, his geological, and geographical reports, and a clear, succinct account of the expedition, written by Clewe himself from the statements of the party, would be ready for publication; and in the brilliantly lighted sky of discovery which now rested, one edge upon Sardis and the other upon the pole, there was but one single cloud, and this was Rovinski.

The ambitious and unscrupulous Pole had been the source of the greatest trouble and uneasiness since he had left Cape Tariff. While there he had found that he could not possibly get ashore, and so had kept quiet; but when on board the vessel which had been sent to them from St. John's, he had soon begun to talk to the crew, and there seemed to be but one way of preventing him from making known what had been done by the expedition before its promoters were ready for the disclosure, and this was to declare him a maniac, whose utterances were of no value whatever. He was put into close confinement, and it was freely reported that he had gone crazy while in the arctic regions, and that his mind had been filled with all sorts of insane notions regarding that part of the world.

It had been intended to put him in jail on a criminal charge, but this would not prevent him from talking; and so, when he arrived in New Jersey, he was sent to an insane asylum, the officers of which were not surprised to receive him, for, in their opinion, a wilder-looking maniac was not, to be found within the walls of the institution.

Early on the morning of the day before the world was to be electrified by the announcement of the discovery of the pole, a man named William Cunningham, employed in the Sardis Works, entered the large building which had been devoted to the manufacture of the automatic shell, but which had not been used of late and had been kept locked. Cunningham was the watchman, and had entered to make his usual morning rounds. He had scarcely closed the door behind him when, looking over towards the engines which still stood by the mouth of the shaft made by the automatic shell, he was amazed to see that the car which had been used by Roland Clewe in his descent was not hanging above them.

Utterly unable to understand this state of affairs, he ran to the mouth of the shaft. He found the great trap-door which had closed it thrown back, and the grating which had been made to cover the orifice after the car had descended in its place. The engines were not moving, and the chain on the windlass of one of them appeared not to have been disturbed, but on the other windlass one of the chains had been unwound. Cunningham was so astonished that he could not believe what he saw. He had been there the night before; everything had been in order, the shaft closed, and the trap-door locked. He leaned over the grating and looked down; he could see nothing but a black hole without any bottom. The man did not look long, for it made him dizzy. He turned and ran out of the house to call Mr. Bryce.

Ivan Rovinski was not perhaps a lunatic, but his unprincipled ambition had made him so disregard the principles of ordinary prudence when such principles stood in his way that it could not be said that he was at all times entirely sane. He understood thoroughly why he had been put in an asylum, and it enraged him to think that by this course his enemies had obtained a great advantage over him. No matter what he might say, it was only necessary to point to the fact that he was in a lunatic asylum, or that he had just come out of one, to make his utterances of no value.

But to remain in confinement did not suit him at all, and, after three days' residence in the institution in which he had been placed, he escaped and made his way to a piece of woods about two miles from Sardis, where, early that year, he had built himself a rude shelter, from which he might go forth at night and study, so far as he should be able, the operations in the Works of Roland Clewe. Having safely reached his retreat, he lost no time in sallying forth to spy out what was going on at Sardis.

He was cunning and wary, and a man of infinite resource. It was not long before he found out that the polar discovery had not been announced, but he also discovered from listening to the conversations of some of the workmen in the village, which he frequently visited in a guise very unlike his ordinary appearance, that something extraordinary had taken place in the Sardis Works, of which he had never heard. A great shaft had been sunk, the people said, by accident; Mr. Clewe had gone down it in a car, and it had taken him nearly three hours to get to the bottom. Nobody yet knew what he had discovered, but it was supposed to be something very wonderful.

The night after Rovinski heard this surprising news he was in the building which had contained the automatic shell. As active as a cat, he had entered by an upper window.

Rovinski spent the night in that building. He had with him a dark lantern, and he made the most thorough examination of the machinery at the mouth of the shaft. He was a man of great mechanical ability and an expert in applied electricity. He understood that machinery, with all its complicated arrangements and appliances, as well as if he had built it himself. In fact, while examining it, he thought of some very valuable improvements which might have been made in it. He knew that it was an apparatus for lowering the car to a great depth, and, climbing into the car, he examined everything it contained. Coming down, he noticed the grating, and he knew what it was for. He looked over the engines and calculated the strength of the chains on the windlasses. He took an impression of the lock of the trap-door, and when he went away in the very early hours of the morning he understood the apparatus which was intended to lower the car as well as any person who had managed it. He knew nothing about the shaft under the great door, but this he intended to investigate as thoroughly as he had investigated the machinery.

The next night he entered the building very soon after Cunningham had gone his rounds, and he immediately set to work to prepare for his descent into the shaft. He disconnected one of the engines, for he sneeringly said to himself that the other one was more than sufficient to lower and raise the car. He charged and arranged all the batteries and put in perfect working order the mechanism by which Clewe had established a connection between the car and the engines, using one of the chains as a conductor, so that he could himself check or start the engines if an emergency should render it necessary.

Then Rovinski, bounding around like a wild animal in a cage, took out a key he had brought with him, opened the trap-door, lifted it back, and gazed down. He could see a beautifully cut well, but that was all. But no matter how deep it was, he intended to go down to the bottom of it.

He started the engine and lowered the car to the ground. Then he looked up at a grating which hung above it and determined to make use of this protection. He could not lower it in the ordinary way after he had entered the car, but in fifteen minutes he had arranged a pulley and rope by which, after the car had gone below the surface, he could lower the grating to its place. He got in, started down into the dark hole, stopped the engine, lowered the grating, went down a little farther, and turned on the electric lights.

The descent of Rovinski was a succession of the wildest sensations of amazed delight. Stratum after stratum passed before his astonished eyes, and, when he had gone down low enough, he allowed himself the most extravagant expressions of ecstasy. His progress was not so regular and steady as that of Roland Clewe had been. He found that he had perfect control of the engine and car, and sometimes he went down rapidly, sometimes slowly, and frequently he stopped. As he continued to descend, his amazement at the wonderful depth of the shaft became greater and greater and his mind was totally unable to appreciate the situation. Still he was not frightened, and went on down.

At last Rovinski emerged into the cave of light. There he stopped, the car hanging some twenty or thirty feet above the bottom. He looked out, he saw the shell, he saw the vast expanse of lighted nothingness, he tried to imagine what it was that that mass of iron rested upon. If he had not seen it, he would have thought he had come out into the upper air of some bottomless cavern. But a great iron machine nearly twenty feet long could not rest upon air! He thought he might be dreaming; he sat up and shut his eyes; in a few minutes he would open them and see if he still saw the same incomprehensible things.

The downward passage of Rovinski had occupied a great deal more time than he had calculated for. He had stopped so much, and had been so careful to examine the walls of the shaft, that morning had now arrived in the upper world, and it was at this moment, as he sat with his eyes closed, that William Cunningham looked down into the mouth of the shaft.

Cunningham was an observing man, and that morning he had picked up a pin and stuck it in the lapel of his rough coat, but he had done this hastily and carelessly. The pin was of a recently invented kind, being of a light, elastic metal, with its head of steel. As Cunningham leaned forward the pin slipped out of his coat; it fell through one of the openings in the grating, and descended the shaft head downward.

For the first quarter of a mile the pin went swiftly in an absolutely perpendicular line, nearly at the middle of the shaft. For the next three-quarters of a mile it went down like a rifle-ball. For the next five miles it sped on as if it had been a planet revolving in space. Then, for eight miles, this pin, falling perpendicularly through a greater distance than any object on this earth had ever fallen perpendicularly, went downward with a velocity like that of light. Its head struck the top of the car, which was hanging motionless in the cave of light; it did not glance off, for its momentum was so great that it would glance from nothing. It passed through that steel roof; it passed through Rovinski's head, through his heart, down through the car, and into the great shell which lay below.

When Mr. Bryce and several workmen came running back with William Cunningham, they were as much surprised as he had been, and could form no theory to account for the disappearance of the car. It could not have slipped down accidentally and descended by its own weight, for the trap-door was open and the grating was in place. They sent in great haste for Mr. Clewe, and when he arrived he wasted no time in conjectures, but instantly ordered that the engine which was attached to the car should be started and its chain wound up.

So great was the anxiety to get the car to the surface of the earth that the engine which raised it was run at as high a speed as was deemed safe, and in a little more than an hour the car came out of the mouth of the shaft, and in it sat Ivan Rovinski, motionless and dead.

No one who knew Rovinski wondered that he had had the courage to make the descent of the shaft, and those who were acquainted with his great mechanical ability were not surprised that he had been able to manage, by himself, the complicated machinery which would ordinarily require the service of several men; but every one who saw him in the car, or after he had been taken out of it, was amazed that he should be dead. There was no sign of accident, no perceptible wound, no appearance, in fact, of any cause why he should be a tranquil corpse and not an alert and agile devil. Even when a post-mortem examination was made, the doctors were puzzled. A threadlike solution of continuity was discovered in certain parts of his body, but it was lost in others, and the coroner's verdict was that he came to his death from unknown causes while descending a shaft. The general opinion was that in some way or other he had been frightened to death.

This accident, much to Roland Clewe's chagrin, discovered to the public the existence of the great shaft. Whether or not he would announce its existence himself, or whether he would close it up, had not been determined by Clewe; but when he and Margaret had talked over the matter soon after the terrible incident, his mind was made up beyond all possibility of change, and, by means of great bombs, the shaft was shattered and choked up for a depth of half a mile from its mouth. When this work was accomplished, nothing remained but a shallow well, and, when this had been filled up with solid masonry, the place where the shaft had been was as substantial as any solid ground.

Now the great discovery was probably shut out forever from the world, but Clewe was well satisfied. He would never make another shaft, and it was not to be expected that men would plan and successfully construct one which would reach down to the transparent nucleus of the earth. The terrible fate, whatever it was, which had overtaken Rovinski, should not, if Clewe could help it, overtake any other human being.

"But my great discovery," said he to Margaret, "that remains as wonderful as the sun, and as safe to look upon; for with my Artesian ray I can bore down to the solid centre of the earth, and into it, and any man can study it with no more danger than if he sat in his armchair at home; and if they doubt what I say about the material of which that solid centre is composed, we can show them the fragments of it which I brought up with me."



CHAPTER XXV

LAURELS

Nothing but a perusal of the newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals of the day could give any idea of the enthusiastic interest which was shown all over the civilized world in Roland Clewe's account of the discovery of the north pole. His paper on the subject, which was the first intimation the public had of the great news, was telegraphed to every part of the world and translated into nearly every written language. Sardis became a Mecca for explorers and scientific people at home and abroad, and honors of every kind were showered by geographical and other learned societies upon Clewe and the brave company who had voyaged under the ice.

Each member of the party who had sailed on the Dipsey became a hero and spent most of those days in according receptions to reporters, scholars, travellers, sportsmen, and as many of the general public as could be accommodated.

Sarah Block received her numerous visitors in the parlor of the house which had been occupied by Mr. Clewe (and which he had vacated in her favor the moment he had heard an intimation that she would like to have it), in a beautiful gown made of the silky fibre from the pods of the American milk-weed, then generally used in the manufacture of the finest fabrics.

Sarah fully appreciated her position as the woman who had visited the pole, a position not only unique at the time, but which she believed would always remain so. In every way she endeavored to make her appearance suitable to her new position. She wore the best clothes that her money could buy, and furnished her new house very handsomely. She discarded her old silver andirons and fender, which required continual cleaning, and which would not have been tolerated by her except that they were made of a metal which was now so cheap as to be used for household utensils, and she put in their place a beautiful set of polished brass, such as people used in her mother's time. Whenever Sarah found any one whom she considered worthy to listen, she gave a very full account of her adventures, never omitting the loss of her warm and comfortable shoes, which misfortune, together with the performances of Rovinski, and all the dangers consequent, and the acquaintance of the tame and lonely whale, she attributed to the fact that there were thirteen people on board.

Sammy's accounts were in a more cheerful key, and his principles were not affected by his success. He never had believed that there was any good in finding the pole, and he did not believe it now. When they got there, it was just like any other part of the ocean, and it required a great deal of arithmetic and navigation to find out where it was, even when they were looking at it; besides, as he had found out to his disgust, even when they had discovered it, it was not the real pole to which the needle of the compass points.

Moreover, if there had been any distinctive mark about it, except the buoy which they had anchored there, and even if it really were the pole to which needles should point, there was no particular good in finding it, unless other people could get there. But in regard to any other expedition reaching the open polar sea under the ice, Sammy had grave doubts. If a whale could not get out of that sea there was every reason why nobody else should try to get into it; the Dipsey's entrance was the barest scratch, and he would not try it again if the north pole were marked out by a solid mountain of gold.

Roland Clewe refused in all personal interviews to receive the laudations offered him as the discoverer of the pole. It was true that the expedition had been planned by him, and all the arrangements and mechanisms which had insured its success were of his invention, but he steadily insisted that Mr. Gibbs and Sammy, as representatives of the party, should be awarded the glory of the great discovery.

The remarkable success of this most remarkable expedition aroused a widespread spirit of arctic exploration. Not only were voyages under the ice discussed and planned, but there was a strong feeling in favor of overland travel by means of the electric-motor sledges; and in England and Norway expeditions were organized for the purpose of reaching the polar sea in this way. It was noticed in most that was written and said upon this subject that one of the strongest inducements for arctic expeditions was the fact that there would be found on the shores of the polar sea a telegraph station, by means of which instantaneous news of success could be transmitted.

The interest of sportsmen, especially of the hunters of big game, was greatly excited by the statement that there was a whale in the polar sea. These great creatures being extinct everywhere else, it would be a unique and crowning glory to capture this last survivor of his race; and there were many museums of natural history which were already discussing contracts with intending polar whalers for the purchase of the skeleton of the last whale.

During all this time of enthusiasm and excitement, Roland Clewe made no reference, in any public way, to his great discovery, which, in his opinion, far surpassed in importance to the world all possible arctic discoveries. He was busily engaged in increasing the penetrating distance of his Artesian ray, and when the public mind should have sufficiently recovered from the perturbation into which it had been thrown by the discovery of the pole, he intended to lay before it the results of his researches into the depths of the earth.

At last the time arrived when he was ready for the announcement of the great achievement of his life. The machinery for the production of the Artesian ray had been removed to the larger building which had contained the automatic shell, and was set up very near the place where the mouth of the great shaft had been.

The lenses were arranged so that the path of the great ray should run down alongside of the shaft and but a few feet from it. The screen was set up as it had been in the other building, and everything was made ready for the operations of the photic borer.

The address which Roland Clewe now delivered to the company was made as brief and as much to the point as possible. The description of the Artesian ray was listened to with the deepest interest and with a vast amount of unexpressed incredulity. What he subsequently said regarding his automatic shell and its accidental descent through fourteen miles of the earth's crust, excited more interest and more incredulity, not entirely unexpressed. Clewe was well known as a man of science, an inventor, an electrician of rare ability, and a person of serious purpose and strict probity, but it was possible for a man of great attainments and of the highest moral character to become a little twisted in his intellect.

When at last the speaker told of his descent into the shaft; of his passage fourteen miles into the interior of the earth; of his discoveries, on which he based his theory that the centre of our globe is one vast diamond, there was a general laugh from the reporters' quarter, and the men of science began to move uneasily in their seats and to talk to each other. Professor Tippengray, her silver hair brushed smoothly back from her pale countenance, sat looking at the speaker through her gold spectacles, as if the rays from her bright eyes would penetrate into the very recesses of his soul. Not an atom of doubt was in her mind; she never doubted, she believed or she disbelieved. At present she believed; she had come there to do that, and she would wait, and when the proper time had come to disbelieve she would do so.

If there had been any disposition in the audience to considerately leave the man of shattered intellect to the care of his friends, it disappeared when Clewe said that he would now be glad to show to all present the workings of the Artesian ray. Crazy as he might be, they wanted to wait and see what he had done. The workmen who had charge of the machinery were on hand, and in a few moments a circle of light was glowing on the ground within the screen. Clewe now announced that he would take those present, one at a time, inside the enclosure and show them how light could be made to penetrate miles downward into the solid earth and rock.

Professor Tippengray was the first one invited to step within the screen. Clewe stood at the entrance ready to explain or to hand her the necessary telescopes; and as the portion of her body which remained visible was between him and the light, there was nothing to disturb his nerves.

The lenses were so set that they could penetrate almost instantly to the depth which had previously been reached, but Clewe made his ray move downward somewhat slowly; he did not wish, especially to the first observer, to show everything at once.

As she beheld at her feet a great lighted well, extending downward beyond the reach of her sharp eyes, Professor Tippengray stepped back with a scream which caused nearly everybody in the audience to start to his feet. Clewe expected this. He raised his hand to the company, asking them to keep still; then he handed Professor Tippengray a stick.

"Take this," he said, "and strike that disk of light; you will find it as solid ground as that you stand on." She did so.

"It is solid!" she gasped; "but where is the end of the stick?"

He turned off the light; there was the end of the stick, and there was the little patch of sandy gravel, which he stepped upon, stamping heavily as he did so. He then retired outside the screen. Professor Tippengray turned to the audience.

"It is all right, gentlemen," she said; "there is nothing to be afraid of. I am going on with the investigation."

Down, down, down went the light, and, telescope in hand, she stood close to the shining edge of the apparent shaft.

"Presently," Clewe said, "you will see the end of the shaft which my Artesian ray is making; then you will perceive a vast expanse of lighted nothingness; that is the great cleft in the diamond which I described to you. In this, apparently suspended in light, you will notice the broken conical end of an enormous iron shell, the shell which made the real tunnel down which I descended in the car."

At this she turned around and looked at him. Even into her strong mind the sharp edge of distrust began to insert itself.

"Look!" said he.

She looked through her telescope. There was the cave of light; there was the shattered end of the shell.

The hands which held the telescope began to tremble. Quickly Clewe drew her away.

"Now," said he, "do you believe?"

For a few moments she could not speak, and then she whispered, "I believe that I have seen what you have told me I should see."

Now succeeded a period of intense excitement, such as was perhaps never before known in an assembly of scientific people. One by one, each person was led by Clewe inside the screen and shown the magical shaft of light. Each received the revelation according to his nature. Some were dumfounded and knew not what to think, others suspected all sorts of tricks, especially with the telescopes, but a well-known optician, who by Clewe's request had brought a telescope of his own, quickly disproved all suspicions of this kind. Many could not help doubting what they had seen, but it was impossible for them to formulate their doubts, with that wonderful shaft of light still present to their mental visions.

For more than two hours Roland Clewe exhibited the action of his Artesian ray. Then he called the company to order. He had shown them his shaft of light, and now he would give them some facts in regard to the real shaft made by the automatic shell.

Every man who had been concerned in Mr. Clewe's descent into the shaft, and those who had assisted in the sounding and the photographing, as well as the persons who had been present when Rovinski was drawn up from its depths, now came forward and gave his testimony. Clewe then exhibited the photographs he had taken with his suspended camera, and to the geologists present these were revelations of absorbing interest; seeing so much that they understood, it was difficult to doubt what they saw and did not understand.

Now that what Clewe had just told them was substantiated by a number of witnesses, and now that they had heard from these men that a plummet, a camera, and a car had been lowered fourteen miles into the bowels of the earth, they had no reason to suppose that the great shaft had existed only in the imagination of one crazy man, and they could not believe that all these assistants and workmen were lunatics or liars. Still they doubted. Clewe could see that in their faces as they intently listened to him.

"My friends," said he, "I have set before you nearly all the facts connected with my experience in the shaft, but one important fact I have not yet mentioned. I am quite sure that few, if any of you, believe that I descended into the cleft of a great diamond lying beneath what we call the crust of the earth. I will now state that before I left that cavity I picked up some fragments of the material of which it is composed, which were splintered off when my shell fell into it. I will show you one of them."

A man brought a table covered with a blue cloth, and from one of his pockets Clewe drew a small bag. Opening this, he took out a diamond which he had brought up from the cave of light, and placed it on the middle of the table.

"This," he said, "is a fragment of the mass of diamond into which I descended. I have called it 'The Great Stone of Sardis.'"

Nobody spoke, nobody seemed to breathe. The huge diamond, of the form and size of a large lemon, lay glowing upon the dark cloth, its irregular facets—all of them clean-cut and polished, the results of fracture—absorbed and reflected the light, and a halo of subdued radiance surrounded the great gem like a tender mist.

"I brought away a number of fragments of the diamond," said Clewe, his voice sounding as if he spoke into an empty hall, "and some of them have been tested by two of the gentlemen present. Here are the stones which have been tested." And he laid some small pieces on the cloth. "They are of the same material as the large one. I brought them all from what I believe to be the great central core of the earth."

Everybody pressed forward, they surrounded the table. One of the jewelers reverently took up the great stone; then in his other hand he took one of the smaller fragments, which he instantly recognized from its peculiar shape. He looked from one to the other; presently he said:

"They are the same substances. This is a diamond." And he laid the great stone back upon the cloth.

"Is there any other place on the surface of this earth, or is there any mine," inquired a shrill voice from the company, "where one could get a diamond like that?"

"There is no such place known to mortal man," replied the jeweler.

"Then," said the same shrill voice, which belonged to a professor from Harvard, "I think it is the duty of every one present, whose mind is capable of it, to believe that the centre of this earth, or a part of that centre, is a vast diamond; at the same time I would say that my mind is not capable of such a belief."

The public excitement produced by the announcement of the discovery of the pole was a trifle compared to that resulting from the news of the proceedings of that day. Clewe's address, with full accounts by the reporters, was printed everywhere, and it was not long before the learned world had given itself up to the discussion.

From this controversy Roland Clewe kept himself aloof. He had done all that he wanted to do, he had shown all that he cared to show; now he would let other people investigate his facts and his reasonings and argue about them; he would retire—he had done enough.

Professor Tippengray was one of the most enthusiastic defenders of Clewe's theories, and wrote a great deal on the subject.

"Granted," she said, in one of her articles, "that the carboniferous minerals, of which the diamond is one, are derived from vegetable matter, and that wood and plants must have existed before the diamond, where, may I ask, did the prediamond-forests derive their carbon? In what form did it exist before they came into being?"

In another essay she said:

"Half a century ago it was discovered that a man could talk through a thousand miles of wire, and yet now we doubt that a man can descend through fourteen miles of rock."

As to the Artesian ray itself, there could be no doubt whatever, for when Clewe, in one of his experiments, directed it horizontally through a small mountain and objects could be plainly discerned upon the other side, discussions in regard to the genuineness of the action of the photic borer were useless.

In medicine, as well as surgery, the value of the Artesian ray was speedily admitted by the civilized world. To eliminate everything between the eye of the surgeon and the affected portion of a human organism was like the rising of the sun upon a hitherto benighted region.

In the winter, Margaret Raleigh and Roland Clewe were married. They travelled; they lived and loved in pleasant places; and they returned the next year rich in new ideas and old art trophies. They bought a fine estate, and furnished it and improved it as an artist paints a picture, without a thought of the cost of the colors he puts upon it. They were rich enough to have everything they cared to wish for. Undue toil and troubled thought had been the companions of Roland Clewe for many a year, and their company had been imposed upon him by his poverty; now he would not, nor would his wife, allow that companionship to be imposed upon him by his riches.

The Great Stone of Sardis was sold to a syndicate of kings, each member of which was unwilling that this dominant gem of the world should belong exclusively to any royal family other than his own. When a coronation should occur, each member of the syndicate had a right to the use of the jewel; at other times it remained in the custody of one of the great bankers of the world, who at stated periods allowed the inhabitants of said planet to gaze upon its transcendent brilliancy.

But the Works at Sardis were not given up. Margaret was not jealous of her rival, Science, and if Roland had ceased to be an inventor, a discoverer, a philosopher, simply because he had become a rich and happy husband, he would have ceased to be the Roland she had loved so long.

The discovery of the north pole had given him fame and honor; for, notwithstanding the fact that he had never been there, he was always considered as the man who had given to the world its only knowledge of its most northern point.

But in his heart Roland Clewe placed little value upon this discovery. Before Mr. Gibbs had announced the exact location of the north pole, all the students of geography had known where it was; before the eyes of the party on the Dipsey had rested upon the spot pointed out by Mr. Gibbs, it was well understood that the north pole was either an invisible point on the surface of ice or an invisible point on the surface of water. If no possible good could result from a journey such as the Dipsey had made, no subsequent good of a similar kind could ever be expected; for the next submarine vessel which attempted a northern journey under the ice was as likely to remain under the ice as it was to emerge into the open air; and if any one reached the open sea upon motor sledges, it would be necessary for them to carry boats with them if they desired so much as a sight of that weather-vane which, no matter how the wind blew, always pointed to the south.

It was the Artesian ray which Clewe considered the great achievement of his life, and to this he intended to devote the remainder of his working days. It was his object to penetrate deeper and deeper with this ray into the interior of the earth. He could always provide himself with telescopes which would show him the limit reached by his photic borer, and so long as that limit was a transparent disk, illuminated by his great ray, so long he would believe in the existence of the diamond centre of the earth. But when the penetrating light reached something different, then would come the time for a change in his theories.

Discussion and controversy in regard to the discoveries of the Artesian ray continued, often with great earnestness and heat, in learned circles, and there were frequent demands upon Clewe to demonstrate the truth of his descent of fourteen miles below the surface of the earth by an actual exhibition of the shaft he had made or by the construction of another.

But to such requests Clewe turned a deaf ear. It would be impossible for him to open his old shaft. If in any way he could remove the rocks and soil which now blocked up its upper portion for a distance of half a mile, it would be impossible to reconstruct any portion which had been obstructed. The smooth and polished walls of the shaft, which gave Clewe such assurance of safety from falling fragments, would not exist if the tunnel were opened.

As to a new shaft—that would require a new automatic shell, and this Clewe was not willing to construct. In fact, rather than make a new opening to the cave of light, he would prefer that people should doubt that any such cave existed. The more he thought of his own descent into that great cleft, the more he thought of the horrible danger of sliding down some invisible declivity to awful, unknown regions; the more he thought of the mysterious death of Rovinski, the more firmly did he determine that not by his agency should a human being descend again to those mysterious depths. He would do all that he could to enable men to see into the interior of this earth, but he would do nothing to help any man to get there.

The controversies in regard to their discoveries and theory disturbed Roland and Margaret not a whit; they worked steadily, with energy and zeal, and, above all, they worked without that dreadful cloud which so frequently overhangs the laborer in new fields—the fear that the means of labor will disappear before the object of the work shall come in view.

One morning in the early summer, Roland rushed into the room where Margaret sat.

"I have made a discovery!" he exclaimed. "Come quickly, I want to show it to you!"

The heart of the young wife sank. During all these happy days the only shadow that ever flitted across her sky was the thought that some novel temptation of science might turn her husband from the great work to which he had dedicated himself. Much that he had purposed to do, he had, at her earnest solicitation, set aside in favor of what she considered the greatest task to which a human being could give his time, his labor, and his thought. It had been long since she had heard her husband speak of a new discovery, and the words chilled her spirit.

"Come," he said, "quickly!" And, taking her by the hand, he led her out upon the lawn.

Over the soft green turf, under the beautiful trees, by the bright flowers of the parterres and through the natural beauty of the charming park, he led her; but not a word did she say of the soft colors and the soft air. Not a flower did she look at. It seemed to her as if she trod a bleak and stony road. She dreaded what she might hear, what she might see.

He led her hastily through a gate in the garden wall; they passed through the garden, and, whispering to her to step lightly, they entered a quiet, shady spot beyond the house grounds.

"This way," he whispered. "Stoop down. Do you see that shining thing with bright-red patches of color? It is an old tomato-can; a robin has built her nest in it; there are three dear little birds inside; the mother-bird is away, and I wanted you to come before she returned. Isn't it lucky that I should have found that? And here, in our own grounds? I don't believe there was ever another robin who made her nest in a tomato-can!"

Doubtless the two birds who had made that nest sincerely loved each other; and there were at that moment a great many other birds, and a great many men and women, in the same plight, but never anywhere did any human being possess a soul so happy as that of Margaret at that moment.

"Roland," she said, "when I first knew you, you would not have noticed such a little thing as that."

"I couldn't afford it," he said.

"It is the sweetest charm of all your triumphs!" said she.

"What is?" he asked.

"That you feel able to afford it now," answered Margaret.

Samuel Block and his wife Sarah found that life grew pleasanter as they grew older. Fortunate winds had blown down to them from the distant north; the substantial rewards of the enterprise were eminently satisfactory, and the honors which came to them were not at all unwelcome even to the somewhat cynical Samuel.

Sitting one evening with his wife before a cheering fire—for both of them were wedded to the old-fashioned ways of keeping warm—Sammy laid down the daily paper with a smile.

"There's an account here," he said, "of a lot o' fools who are goin' to fit out a submarine-ship to try to go under the ice to the pole, as we did. They may get there, and they may get back; they may get there, and they may never get back; and they may never get there, and never get back; but whichever of the three it happens to be, it'll be of no more good than if they measured a mile to see how many inches there was in it."

"Sammy," exclaimed Sarah, "I do think you are old enough to stop talkin' such nonsense as that. To be sure, there was a good many things that I objected to in that voyage to the pole. In the first place, there was thirteen people on board, which was the greatest mistake ever committed by a human explorin' party; and then, agin, there was no provision for keepin' whales from bumpin' the ship, and if you knew the number of hours that I laid awake on that Dipsey thinkin' what would happen if the frolicsome whale determined not to be left alone, and should follow us into narrow quarters, you would understand my feelin's on that subject; but as to sayin' there wasn't no good in the expedition —I think that's downright wickedness. Look at that fender; look at them andirons, them beautiful brass candlesticks, and that shovel and tongs, with handles shinin' like gold! If it hadn't been that we discovered the pole, and so got able to afford good furniture, all those handsome things would have been made of common silver, just as if they was pots and kittles, or garden-spades!"

THE END