The works of Edgar Allan Poe; newly collected and edited, with a memoir, critical introductions, and notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry; the illustrations by Albert Edward Sterner.

TALES OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE

understand. Do you hear anything? Do you see
any change in the water?"
We had now been about ten minutes upon the top
of Helseggen, to which we had ascended from the
interior of Lofoden, so that we had caught no glimpse
of the sea until it had burst upon us from the summit.
As the old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and
gradually increasing sound, like the moaning of a vast
herd of buffaloes upon an American prairie; and at
the same moment I perceived that what seamen term
the chopping character of the ocean beneath us, was
rapidly changing into a current which set to the eastward. Even while I gazed, this current acquired a
monstrous velocity. Each moment added to its speed
-to its headlong impetuosity. In five minutes the
whole sea, as far as Vurrgh, was lashed into ungov-; ernable fury; but it was between:Moskoe and the
coast that the main uproar held its sway. Here the
vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a
thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into
frenzied convulsion- heaving, boiling, hissing - gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all
whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a
rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes, except
in precipitous descents.
In a few minutes more, there came over the scene
another radical alteration. The general surface grew
somewhat more smooth, and the whirlpools, one by
one, disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam
became apparent where none had been seen before.
These streaks, at length, spreading out to a great dis~
tance, and entering into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided vortices,.and seemed to form the germ of another more vast.
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