The president was sufficiently known for all to be assured that he would not have called together his colleagues without a very great motive.
Impey Barbicane was a man of forty, calm, cold, austere, of a singularly serious and concentrated mind, as exact as a chronometer, of an imperturbable temperament and immovable character; not very chivalrous, yet adventurous, and always bringing practical ideas to bear on the wildest enterprises; an essential New-Englander, a Northern colonist, the descendant of those Roundheads so fatal to the Stuarts, and the implacable enemy of the Southern gentlemen, the ancient cavaliers of the mother country--in a word, a Yankee cast in a single mould.
Barbicane had made a great fortune as a timber-merchant; named director of artillery during the war, he showed himself fertile in inventions; enterprising in his ideas, he contributed powerfully to the progress of ballistics, gave an immense impetus to experimental researches.
He was a person of average height, having, by a rare exception in the Gun Club, all his limbs intact.

His strongly-marked features seemed to be drawn by square and rule, and if it be true that in order to guess the instincts of a man one must look at his profile, Barbicane seen thus offered the most certain indications of energy, audacity, and _sang-froid_.
At that moment he remained motionless in his chair, mute, absorbed, with an inward look sheltered under his tall hat, a cylinder of black silk, which seems screwed down upon the skull of American men.
His colleagues talked noisily around him without disturbing him; they questioned one another, launched into the field of suppositions, examined their president, and tried, but in vain, to make out the _x_ of his imperturbable physiognomy.
Just as eight o'clock struck from the fulminating clock of the large hall, Barbicane, as if moved by a spring, jumped up; a general silence ensued, and the orator, in a slightly emphatic tone, spoke as follows:-- "Brave colleagues,--It is some time since an unfruitful peace plunged the members of the Gun Club into deplorable inactivity.

After a period of some years, so full of incidents, we have been obliged to abandon our works and stop short on the road of progress.

I do not fear to proclaim aloud that any war which would put arms in our hands again would be welcome--" "Yes, war!" cried impetuous J.T.

Maston.
"Hear, hear!" was heard on every side.
"But war," said Barbicane, "war is impossible under actual circumstances, and, whatever my honourable interrupter may hope, long years will elapse before our cannons thunder on a field of battle.