I shall stand ready to pay cash for Siberia the moment it is delivered,

and thus save my honor and my credit. I am confident of this.

I would like you to provide a proper outfit and start north as soon as I

telegraph you, be it night or be it day. I wish you to take up all the

country stretching away from the north pole on all sides for many degrees

south, and buy Greenland and Iceland at the best figure you can get now

while they are cheap. It is my intention to move one of the tropics up

there and transfer the frigid zone to the equator. I will have the

entire Arctic Circle in the market as a summer resort next year, and will

use the surplusage of the old climate, over and above what can be

utilized on the equator, to reduce the temperature of opposition resorts.

But I have said enough to give you an idea of the prodigious nature of my

scheme and the feasible and enormously profitable character of it.

I shall join all you happy people in England as soon as I shall have sold

out some of my principal climates and arranged with the Czar about

Siberia.

Meantime, watch for a sign from me. Eight days from now, we shall be

wide asunder; for I shall be on the border of the Pacific, and you far

out on the Atlantic, approaching England. That day, if I am alive and my

sublime discovery is proved and established, I will send you greeting,

and my messenger shall deliver it where you are, in the solitudes of the

sea; for I will waft a vast sun-spot across the disk like drifting smoke,

and you will know it for my love-sign, and will say "Mulberry Sellers

throws us a kiss across the universe."

297

The American Claimant