If I'd only had a daughter I should have wanted her to be
just like you, and I should have wanted her to marry a man just like
Lord Redgrave. But there's a limit to everything. You say that you are
going to the moon and the stars, and to see what the other planets are
like. Well, that's your affair. I hope God will forgive you for your
presumption, and let you come back safe, but I----No. Ten--twenty
millions wouldn't pay me to tempt Providence like that."
The _Astronef_ had landed in front of the White House, as everybody
knows, on the eve of the Presidential election. After dinner in the
deck-saloon, as the Space Navigator lay in the midst of a square of
troops, outside which a huge crowd surged and struggled to get a look at
the latest miracle of constructive science, the President and the
British Ambassador said goodbye, and as soon as the gangway ladder was
drawn in the _Astronef_, moved by no visible agency, rose from the
ground amidst a roar of cheers coming from a hundred thousand throats.
She stopped at a height of about a thousand feet, and then her forward
searchlight flashed out, swept the horizon, and vanished. Then it
flashed out again intermittently in the longs and shorts of the Morse
Code, and these, when translated, read:
"Vote for sound men and sound money!"
In five minutes the wires of the United States were alive with the
terse, pregnant message, and under the ocean in the dark depths of the
Atlantic ooze, vivid narratives of the coming of the miracle went
flashing to a hundred newspaper offices in England and on the Continent.
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