beheld her, motionless in the tideless, dark-green waters at the bottom of the ocean!--figures of her people, lying, sitting, standing round about her in the attitudes they were drowned in, preserved from decay by the petrifying stagnation of the currentless dark brine. It was now that I was alone, the deep breathing of sleepers rising from the deck near me, the eyes of my mind quickened by high-strung imagination into perception, vivid as actuality itself, of the visions of this galleon in her sunlit heyday and then in her glory of shells and plants in the unimaginable hush of the fathomless void from which she had emerged, that I fell to thinking gravely and wonderingly over what Johnson, the sick sailor, had said touching the possibility of this island’s sudden disappearance. Of such volcanic upheavals as this I had read and heard again and again. Sometimes the land thus created stood for years; sometimes it vanished within a few hours of its formation. I particularly recollected a story that I had met with in the ‘Naval Chronicle’; how two ships were in company off a height of land rising sixty feet above the level of the sea, that was uncharted and unknown to the captains of the vessels, though one of them had been in those waters a few weeks before and both men were intimately well-acquainted with the navigation of that tract of ocean; how after masters and crews had been staring, lost in wonder, at the tall, pale, sterile, sugar-loaf acclivity, one of the commanders sent a boat over in charge of his mate, that he might land and return with a report; when, whilst the boat was within a long musket-shot of the island, the land sank softly but swiftly without noise, and with so small a commotion of the sea following the disappearance of the loftiest point of peak, that the darkening of the surface of the ocean with ripples there seemed as no more than the shadow of a current.