Verne's story describes a trip on the "Great Eastern," from Liverpool to New York, and a journey afterwards up the Hudson and to the Falls of Niagara. The descriptive parts of the story are free from Verne's well-known peculiarities, and therefore seem tame coming from his pen ; but in making " the floating city" the scene of a dramatic love story, he is all himself again—particularly at the end, where the hero engages in a duel on deck in the night during a frightful storm, and his antagonist catches the lightning on his uplifted sword and is killed, thus saving the hero from the unpleasantness of killing tbe husband of the woman he loves.