Thomas M. Clark 52 min read

Taking a shortcut across the fields on his paper route, young John Whopper falls straight through a hole in the Earth, discovering, quite by accident, the air-line to China.

Thomas M. Clark's 1871 tale is a charming, tall-tale fantasy of a boy's fall clear through the planet. Whimsical, inventive period juvenile fiction. Read it for a delightful nineteenth-century flight of fancy that turns a hole in the ground into a tunnel to the other side of the world.

In its time

Published in 1871, during the 1870s, under the sea and around the moon.

Reading it

52 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).