ls and staves. I have already described the unnatural curiosity
which had taken the place of my original terrors. It appeared to grow
upon me as I drew nearer and nearer to my dreadful doom. I now began 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 Moskoe-stroem. 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 _completely absorbed_--that the others had
entered the whirl at so late a period of the tide, or, for 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 conceived it possible, in either instance, that they might
thus be whirled up again to the level of the ocean, without undergoing
the fate of those which had been drawn in more early, or absorbed more
rapidly. I made, also, three important observations. The first was,
that, as a general rule, the larger the bodies were, the more rapid
their descent--the second, that, between two masses of equal extent, the
one spherical, and the other _of any other shape_, the superiority
in speed of descent was with the sphere--the third, that, between two
masses of equal