“'Tis the vision of his trance--I saw it with these eyes as I passed along the high ground above the Dog's Teeth Reef--the reef was well-nigh bare and naked,” said Hal. “Who is there of us that could tell what the bottom of the sea looked like? We knew what the simple slopes of the beach were--the spaces where the tide was wont to ebb and flow over are known to all; but who before since the world began saw those secret hidden deeps where the lobsters lurk and crabs half the size of a man's body--I saw them with these eyes a while agone--and the little runnels--a thousand of them, I believe, racing through channels in the slime as if they were afraid to be left behind when the sea was ebbing out of sight--and the sun turned all into the colour of blood! What does it all mean, Mr. Wesley--I do not mean the man's trance-dream, but the thing itself that hath come to pass?” “We shall go forth and be witnesses of all,” said Wesley. He was not excited; but this could not be said of his companions; they betrayed their emotions in various ways. Mr. Hartwell and the miller were silent and apparently stolid; but the carrier and the smith talked. Very few minutes sufficed to bring them to the summit of the cliff that commanded a full view seaward. At high tide the waves just reached the base of these cliffs, and the furthest ebb only left bare about a hundred feet of sand and shingle, with large smooth pebbles in ridges beyond the groins of the out-jutting rocks. But now it was a very different picture from that of the ordinary ebb that stretched away to the horizon under the eyes of our watchers. The sandy breadth, with its many little ribs made by the waves, sloped into a line of sparse sea weed, tangled tufts of green and brown, and some long and wiry, and others flat with large and leathery bosses, like the studs of a shield. But beyond this space the rocks of the sea-bed began to show, There they were in serrated rows--rocks that had never before been seen by human eyes. Some lay in long sharp ridges, with here and there a peak of a miniature mountain, and beyond these lines of ridges there was a broad tableland, elevated in places and containing huge hollow basins brimming over with water, out of which every now and again a huge fish leaped, only to find itself struggling among the thick weeds. Further away still there was a great breadth of ooze, and then peak beyond peak of rocks, to which huge, grotesque weeds were clinging, having the semblance of snakes coiled round one another and dying in that close embrace. Looking over these strange spaces was like having a bird's-eye view of an unexplored country of mountains and tablelands and valleys intersected by innumerable streams. The whole breadth of sea-bed was veined with little streams hurrying away after the lost sea, and all the air was filled with the prattling and chattering that went on through these channels.