It was impossible to reach him; the emergency admitted of no delay; and so, with a bitter struggle, I resigned him to his fate, fastened myself to the cask by means of the lashings which secured it to the counter, and precipitated myself with it into the sea without another moment’s hesitation.” The smack soon after made a few gyrations in rapid succession, then sank to the bottom for ever, bearing with it the unfortunate brother. “The barrel to which I was attached had sunk very little farther than half the distance between the bottom of the gulf and the spot at which I leaped overboard before a great change took place in the character of the whirlpool. The slope of the sides of the vast funnel became momentarily less and less steep. The gyrations of the whirl grew gradually less and less violent.” By degrees the waters rose, and he found himself in full view of the shores of Lofoden, and above the spot where the pool of the moskoe‐strom _had been_. He was picked up by a boat; those on board were old mates and daily companions, but they knew him no more than they would have known a traveller from the spirit‐land. His hair, which had been raven black the day before, was now as white as snow. Thus far Poe. It shows how the vivid imagination of a great poet, dealing with facts, can put those facts before the reader in artistically life‐ like and graphic form. [Illustration: WHIRLPOOL OF CORRIEVRECKAN, OFF THE HEBRIDES.] Another remarkable whirlpool is that of Corrievreckan, off the Hebrides, in the south of Scotland, shown in an illustration on page 93. A phenomenon of another character is exhibited on the south side of the Mauritius, at a point called “The Souffleur,” or “The Blower.” “A large mass of rock,” says Lieutenant Taylor, of the United States navy, “runs out into the sea from the mainland, to which it is joined by a neck of rock not two feet broad. The constant beating of the tremendous swell which rolls in has undermined it in every direction, till it has exactly the appearance of a Gothic building with a number of arches. In the centre of the rock, which is about thirty‐five or forty feet above the sea, the water has forced two passages vertically upward, which are worn as smooth and cylindrical as if cut by a chisel. When a heavy sea rolls in, it of course fills in an instant the hollow caverns underneath; and finding no other egress, and being borne in with tremendous violence, rushes up these chimneys, and flies, roaring furiously, to a height of full sixty feet. The moment the wave recedes, the vacuum beneath causes the wind to rush into the two apertures with a loud humming noise, which is heard at a considerable distance. “My companion and I arrived there before high water; and, having climbed across the neck of rock, we seated ourselves close to the chimneys, where I proposed making a sketch, and had just begun, when in came a thundering sea, which broke right over the rock itself, and drove us back much alarmed.