with a wild little gasp whose triumph was
a sob upon the still laboratory air.

"Lay its egg in a nest of the moon! A
dead nest! It will do more than that,
little Pem!" Toandoah, the inventor,
turned from fitting a number of tiny sky-rockets
into the supply chamber of a larger
one,--turned with that living coal of fire
in his eye which only the inventor can know,
and looked upon his daughter. "Yes, it
will do more than that! The Thunder
Bird will lay its golden egg for us--if it
drops its expiring one upon the moon.
It will send us back the first record from
space, the very first information as to what
it may be that lies up--away up--a
couple of hundred miles, or so, above us,
in the outer edges of the earth's atmosphere
of which less is known at present than of
the deepest soundings of the ocean. Our
Thunder Bird will be the--first--explorer."

The man's eyes were dim now. For a
moment he saw as in a prism the work of
[[2]]

p001 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p002w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p003

v?