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

to watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things
that floated in our company. I must have been
delirious-for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several
descents toward the foam below. 'This fir tree, I
found myself at one time saying, 'will certainly be
the next thing that takes the awful plunge and disappears,' -and then I was disappointed to find that
the wreck of a Dutch merchant ship overtook it
and went down before. At length, after making
several guesses of this nature, and being deceived in
all —this fact -the fact of my invariable miscalculation, set me upon a train of reflection that made
my limbs again tremble, and my heart beat heavily
once more.
" It was not a new terror that thus affected me, but
the dawn of a more exciting hope. This hope arose
partly from memory, and partly from present observation. I called to mind the great variety of buoyant
matter that strewed the coast of Lofoden, having
been absorbed and then thrown forth by the Moskoestr6m. By far the greater number of the articles were
shattered in the most extraordinary way- so chafed
and roughened as to have the appearance of being
stuck full of splinters — but then I distinctly recollected that there were some of them which were not
disfigured at all. Now I could not account for this
difference except by supposing that the roughened
fragments were the only ones which had been com2letely absorbed-that the others had entered the
whirl at so late a period of the tide, or, from some
reason, had descended so slowly after entering, that
they did not reach the bottom before the turn of the
flood came, or of the ebb, as the case might be. I
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