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.

MS. FOUND IN A BOTTLE

I have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the
incredible tale I have to tell should be considered
rather the raving of a crude imagination than the
positive experience of a mind to which the reveries of
fancy have been a dead letter and a nullity.
After many years spent in foreign travel, I sailed in
the year I8-, from the port of Batavia, in the rich
and populous island of Java, on a voyage to the
Archipelago of the Sunda Islands. I went as passenger - having no other inducement than a kind of
nervous restlessness which haunted me as a fiend.
Our vessel was a beautiful ship of about four
hundred tons, copper-fastened, and built at Bombay
of Malabar teak. She was freighted with cotton-wool
and oil, from the Laccadive Islands. We had also on
board coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoa-nuts, and a few
cases of opium. The stowage was clumsily done,
and the vessel consequently crank.
We got under way with a mere breath of wind, and
for many days stood along the eastern coast of Java,
without any other incident to beguile the monotony
of our course than the occasional meeting with some
of the small grabs of the Archipelago to which we
were bound.
One evening, leaning over the taffrail, I observed a
very singular isolated cloud, to the N. W. It was
remarkable, as well for its color, as from its being the
first we had seen since our departure from Batavia.
I watched it attentively until sunset, when it spread
all at once to the eastward and westward, girding in
the horizon with a narrow strip of vapor, and looking
like a long line of low beach. My notice was soon
afterwards attracted by the dusky-red appearance of
the moon and the peculiar character of the sea.
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