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Here, in Wisconsin, is the Penokee Range of mountains, chiefly remarkable for its belt of iron are, forty-three miles in length, unbroken and very magnetic. This deposit, averaging 3oo feet in width, extends to an unknown, unfathomed depth. It was over the magnetic ridge that they were now stalking. As Graemantle explained: “It contains more iron than all the other deposits of the United States combined; but owing to the large admixture of silicon with the ore, it has never been utilized.

“It occurred to us that we might convert the whole Penokee iron deposit into a gigantic magnet by winding wire around it. The Society of Futurity wanted to talk with other planets; and to do this we must produce on earth magnetic disturbances of great and decided violence. We must produce them periodically too, so that by their force and their definite order of recurrence they would send a shock through vast distances, and compel the attention of dwellers on another sphere. Then they might respond with similar movements, which we could record on our magnetometers; and so we could start a conversation.

“Look at that cleft in the range, right under us.” He added suddenly. That’s Penokee Gap; and there’s our station, with an engine of five thousand horsepower. “See those telegraph-poles?”

Bemis looked, and beheld poles stationed like dumb sentries along the mountainsides as far as the eye could reach, carrying a great number of copper wires. “There are five hundred turns of that wire,” his new guardian went on; “and each turn is eighty-six miles in length. They encircle this whole mountain mass of iron, which is their core, and make it a colossal magnet, with which we do our planetary telegraphing.”

Alighting at the station, they met Professor Glissman, who was in charge — a small, nervous man, with glittering eyes that made him look as though he wore a pair of sparkling spectacles, or would like to do so if his eyes had not been so bright and piercing without them. As he explained the great machine, he punctuated his remarks with a modest and amiable little cough, as though the bigness of the thing needed some apology. “Five thousand horse-power may not seem much; but the engine drives this great dynamo here, which has an armature wheel eighty feet in diameter, and the armature consists of very fine iron wire, chemically pure and slightly oxidized, over which is wound copper wire, insulated by semi-vulcanized rubber. That surface is carried round at the rate of 28,000 feet a minute. The current lasts only a second or two, but it is sufficient to bring our 500 eighty-six mile copper wires up to blood-heat. Cast your eye, please” — here Glissman coughed with humility — “on the gigantic switch at your elbow. It is moved by an electrometer, which breaks and closes the current in six hundred places simultaneously, and produces a copper arc seventy feet long.”

Then, with a fresh glitter of his peculiar eyes, he pointed out certain leather belts perforated on a definite plan, like a Jacquard loom-card. These belts governed the motor and current controller constantly, with short intervals for return signals. “The engines and dynamo.” He said. “If worked continuously, couldn’t give more than five thousand horse-power. But we do not take electricity from the machine more than one-hundredth of the time. Hence the enormous potential energy of the fly wheel if; capable of causing a current to be sent out which, during its brief period, is equal to one hundred and eighty thousand horse-power.”

The experiments, Bemis was told, had been going on for some eighty-five years. After fifteen years the magnetometer record of the Penokee station suddenly showed — amid the ordinary irregular motions registered on it — a faint periodic motion similar to the waves it was sending into space. Immediately Glissman — who was then a mere child of thirty-one-reduced the period for sending waves from twenty hours to twelve; and thereupon the very same signals came back from the unknown source and