s seat, and as he paced the room with
all the frenzy of poetic inspiration, read out:

"Empty words cannot convey
All a lover's heart would say."

"Well, to be sure, he is at his everlasting verses again!" said Ben Zoof
to himself, as he roused himself in his corner. "Impossible to sleep in
such a noise;" and he gave vent to a loud groan.

"How now, Ben Zoof?" said the captain sharply. "What ails you?"

"Nothing, sir, only the nightmare."

"Curse the fellow, he has quite interrupted me!" ejaculated the captain.
"Ben Zoof!" he called aloud.

"Here, sir!" was the prompt reply; and in an instant the orderly
was upon his feet, standing in a military attitude, one hand to his
forehead, the other closely pressed to his trouser-seam.

"Stay where you are! don't move an inch!" shouted Servadac; "I have
just thought of the end of my rondo." And in a voice of inspiration,
accompanying his words with dramatic gestures, Servadac began to
declaim:

"Listen, lady, to my vows--
O, consent to be my spouse;
Constant ever I will be,
Constant...."

No closing lines were uttered. All at once, with unutterable violence,
the captain and his orderly were dashed, face downwards, to the ground.

CHAPTER IV. A CONVULSION OF NATURE

Whence came it that at that very moment the horizon underwent so strange
and sudden a modification, that the eye of the most practiced mariner
could not distinguish between sea and sky?

Whence came it that the billows raged and rose to a height hitherto
unregistered in the records of science?

Whence came it that the elements united in one deafening crash; that the
earth groaned as though the whole framework of the globe were ruptured;
that the waters roared from their innermost depths; that the air
shrieked with all the fury of a cyclone?

Whence came it that a radiance, intenser than the effulgence of the
Northern Lights, overspread the firmament, and momentarily dimmed the
splendor of the brightest stars?

Whence came it that the Mediterranean, one instant emptied of its
waters, was the next flooded with a foaming surge?

Whence came it that in the space of a few seconds the moon's disc
reached a magnitude as though it were but a tenth part of its ordinary
distance from the earth?

Whence came it that a new blazing spheroid, hitherto unknown to
astronomy, now appeared suddenly in the firmament, though it were but to
lose itself immediately behi