their institutions. As the years advanced to the nineteenth century, the
population was reckoned by hundreds where it had once been numbered by
thousands. Trade disappeared; whole streets were left desolate. Harbors,
once filled with shipping, were destroyed by the unresisted accumulation
of sand. In our own times the decay of these once flourishing cities is
so completely beyond remedy, that the next great change in contemplation
is the draining of the now dangerous and useless tract of water, and
the profitable cultivation of the reclaimed land by generations that are
still to come. Such, briefly told, is the strange story of the Zuyder
Zee.

As we advanced on our voyage, and left the river, I noticed the tawny
hue of the sea, caused by sand-banks which color the shallow water, and
which make the navigation dangerous to inexperienced seamen. We found
our moorings for the night at the fishing island of Marken--a low,
lost, desolate-looking place, as I saw it under the last gleams of the
twilight. Here and there, the gabled cottages, perched on hillocks, rose
black against the dim gray sky. Here and there, a human figure appeared
at the waterside, standing, fixed in contemplation of the strange boat.
And that was all I saw of the island of Marken.

Lying awake in the still night, alone on a strange sea, there were
moments when I found myself beginning to doubt the reality of my own
position.

Was it all a dream? My thoughts of suicide; my vision of the mother and
daughter; my journey back to the metropolis, led by the apparition
of the child; my voyage to Holland; my night anchorage in the unknown
sea--were these, so to speak, all pieces of the same morbid mental
puzzle, all delusions from which I might wake at any moment, and find
myself restored to my senses again in the hotel at London? Bewildered by
doubts which led me further and further from any definite conclusion,
I left my bed and went on deck to change the scene. It was a still and
cloudy night. In the black void around me, the island was a blacker
shadow yet, and nothing more. The one sound that reached my ears was the
heavy breathing of the captain and his crew sleeping on either side of
me. I waited, looking round and round the circle of darkness in which I
stood. No new vision showed itself. When I returned again to the cabin,
and slumbered at last, no dreams came to me. All that was mysterious,
all that was marvelous, in the later events of my life seem