Not long ago I sat down for an evening of tea and stories in Lady Finley's Tea Emporium and Steamery. If you've never been, you owe it to yourself to pay them a visit. Ms. Finley's Caravan Tea is to die for, and her mechanical tea servers are a marvel! At any rate, sometime during the evening, Lady Finley asked me to tell the story of how I fell from the Moon to the Earth; a tale which I will now recount here:
"It is a lengthy tale, but before I begin I would like to send my compliments to the chef regarding these absolutely scrumptious biscuits. I can feel my intestines un-knotting themselves more with every bite! Now, if you'll be so good as to refill my Lapsang I shall endeavor to recall the events as they happened...
For those who do not know me, I am indeed an American; serving as President Grant's special envoy to Her Majesty's Aether Expeditionary Fleet. It was in this capacity that I found myself on the moon. This was in 1863, back when Lincoln commissioned the first of us to advise the crown on new technologies being developed as a result of the war. The British were, at the time, still insisting that it would be possible to build a shipyard on the lunar surface. I had sternly recommended against such folly, saying that moving the materials from the earth to the moon and back would be impractical at best. Oh, we had already been to the moon, the means of our previous ascension being a dirigible which we'd specially outfitted for the task. The kind of operation they were in need of, however, required a bit more speed with regard to the transit between the two, which I told them at the time was too problematic to be attainable.There was nothing for it, however, as their minds were set.

Even so, we were forced to use a much lighter craft than Verne initially planned, and it was this that proved the undoing of the project. I would suffer no one but myself to test the contraption out, not wanting to risk the lives of any of my subordinates. Everything went well enough at first, but the force of the launch made the craft fall apart around me in the earth's upper atmosphere!
It was fortunate that it didn't happen earlier, for I should have had the devil of a time trying to inhale pure aether. As it was, the air was quite thin, and it was all I could do to keep from passing out as I fell. I fell for what seemed an eternity, my hand still clenching the logbook and lead I'd taken with me, and to pass the time I took to sketching what I knew no man had ever seen with the naked eye, hoping that at least some good would come from what I believed to be my imminent death. I made the following sketch of the moon:
This story would have ended right here, were it not for my incredible good fortune of having fallen from the sky directly over Sicily. As you may recall, Mt. Etna erupted in a most violent fashion in 1863, and it was the force of that eruption that slowed my descent. There happened to be a large piece of metal bulkhead from my ship's remains falling in the air near me, and when I saw the cloud of ash and pumice billowing up beneath me I swam through the air until I could position myself on top of it. It was round in shape, and it was my hope that this would enable me to ride the cloud like a sledder on a snow-covered hill!
Alas, such was not the case. Nonetheless, my descent through the cloud was slowed enough that my impact with the slope of the mountain was survivable, and I rode the piece of metal down the side of the mountain and into the town below! Looking back on it now, it's a miracle I survived, but there you are."
I'll admit the tale was met with no small amount of skepticism, as is only right in such a sophisticated atmosphere, but I'm happy to report that the veracity of my tale was confirmed by all present. I do believe an account of the exact tale can be found there, along with the discussion that followed.