Therefore there is no need to re-tell a tale already told, and one that has been read and re-read a thousand times.

Every one who has read his or her newspaper from Chamskatska to Cape Horn, and from Alaska to South Australia, knows how the Commander of the _Astronef_ so nursed the remains which were left to him of the R.Force after overcoming the attraction of the Sun, that he was able to steer an oblique course between the Moon and the Earth, and to counteract what Zaidie called the all too-loving attraction of the Mother Planet, and, after sixty hours of agonising suspense, at last re-entered their native atmosphere.
The expenditure of the last few units of the R.Force enabled them to just clear the summits of the Bolivian Andes, to cross the foothills and western slopes of Peru, and finally to let the _Astronef_ drop quietly on to the bosom of the broad Pacific about twenty miles westward of the Port of Mollendo.
All this time thousands of anxious eyes had been peering through telescopes every night in quest of the wanderers who must now be returning if ever they were to return, and a reward of ten thousand dollars, offered conjointly by the British and United States Governments for the first authentic tidings of the _Astronef_, was won by a smart young Californian, who was Assistant Astronomer at the Harvard University Observatory at Arequipa.
One night when he was on duty watching a lunar occultation, he saw something sweep across the disc of the full moon just as the captain and officers of the _St.Louis_ had seen that same something sweep across the disc of the rising sun.

What else could it be if not the _Astronef_?
He rang for another assistant to go on with the occultation, and wired down to the coast requesting the British Consul at Mollendo to look out for an arrival from the skies.
Three hours later the gleam of an electric searchlight flickered down over the huge black cone of the Misti, and by dawn the next morning one of Her Majesty's cruisers--most appropriately named _Astraea_--attached to the Pacific Squadron then _en route_ from Lima to Valparaiso, steamed out westward from Mollendo and found the long, shining hull of the _Astronef_ waiting quietly on the unrippled rollers of the Pacific, and Lord and Lady Redgrave having breakfast in the deck-chamber.
Compliments and congratulations having been duly exchanged, she was taken in tow by the cruiser, and so reached Valparaiso.

Here she lay for a few days while the wires of the world were being kept hot with telegraphic accounts of her return to Earth, and while her Commander, with the assistance of the officers of the National Laboratory, was replenishing his stock of the R.Fluid from the chemicals which they had placed at his disposal.
It would, of course, have been quite possible for him and Zaidie to have taken steamer northward to Panama, crossed the Isthmus, and returned to New York and Washington _via_ Jamaica.

The British Admiral even offered to place his fastest cruiser at their disposal for a run to San Francisco, whence the Overland Limited would have landed them in New York in four days and a half, but Zaidie vetoed this as quickly as she had done the other proposition.