"How!" asked Lord Frederick, "a discovery, did you say, Sir Dudley?" "Oh, nothing of the kind we should care about, after all," said the Admiral; "from what I could gather, 'twas only scientific, though the American called it '_a_ pretty importaint fact.' This Mr Mathewson Brown, I believe, was sent out by the States' Government as botanist in an expedition to southward, and has leave from Sir Hudson to use his opportunity before the next Indiaman sails, for examining part of the island; and to-day he thought he found the same plants in St Helena as he did in Gough's Island and Tristan d'Acunha, twelve hundred miles off, near the Cape; showing, as he said, how once on a time there must have been land between them, perhaps as far as Ascension!" "Why," put in Lord Frederick, "that would have made a pretty good empire, even for Napoleon!" "So it would, my lord," said Sir Dudley, "much better than Elba,--but the strangest part of it is, this Mr Brown was just telling his Excellency, as I entered the room, that some of the ancient philosophers wrote about this said country existing in the Atlantic before the Flood--how rich it was, with the kings it had, and the wars carried on there; till on account of their doings, no doubt, what with an earthquake, a volcano, and the ocean together, they all sunk to the bottom except the tops of the mountains! Now I must say," continued the Admiral, "all this learning seemed to one to come rather too much by rote out of this gentleman's mouth, and the American style of his talk made it somewhat ludicrous, though he evidently believed in what may be all very true--particularly, in mentioning the treasures that must lie under water for leagues round, or even in nooks about the St Helena rocks, I thought his very teeth watered. As for Sir Hudson, he had caught at the idea altogether, but rather in view of a historical work on the island, from the earliest times till now--and I believe he means to accompany the two botanists himself over toward Longwood to-morrow, where we may very likely get sight of them."