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

extreme and slippery edge —this "little cliff" arose,
a sheer unobstructed precipice of black shining rock,
some fifteen or sixteen hundred feet from the world
of crags beneath us. Nothing would have tempted
me to within half a dozen yards of its brink. In
truth so deeply was I excited by the perilous position
of my companion, that I fell at full length upon the
ground, clung to the shrubs around me, and dared
not even glance upward at the sky - while I struggled
in vain to divest myself of the idea that the very
foundations of the mountain were in danger from
the fury of the winds. It was long before I could
reason myself into sufficient courage to sit up and
look out into the distance.
" You must get over these fancies," said the guide,
"for I have brought you here that you might have
the best possible view of the scene of that event I
mentioned - and to tell you the whole story with the
spot just under your eye.
"We are now," he continued, in that particularizing
manner which distinguished him -" we are now close
upon the Norwegian coast - in the sixty-eighth degree
of latitude - in the great province of Nordland - and
in the dreary district of Lofoden. The mountain
upon whose top we sit is Helseggen,. the Cloudy.
Now raise yourself up a little higher - hold on to the
grass if you feel giddy - so - and look out, beyond
the belt of vapor beneath us, into the sea."
I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of
ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at
once to my mind the Nubian geographer's account of
the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably
desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the
right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay
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