mersion, as
the water escaped from the portholes at its sides.

How many thousands of vessels--how many millions of property--have been
abandoned, and eventually consigned to the all-receiving depths of the
ocean, through ignorance or through fear! What a mine of wealth must
lie buried in its sands! what riches lie entangled amongst its rocks, or
remain suspended in its unfathomable gulf, where the compressed fluid is
equal in gravity to that which it encircles, there to remain secured in
its embedment from corruption and decay, until the destruction of the
universe and the return of chaos!--Yet, immense as the accumulated loss
may be, the major part of it has been occasioned from an ignorance of
one of the first laws of nature, that of specific gravity. The vessel
to which we have referred was, to all appearance, in a situation of as
extreme hazard as that of a drowning man clinging to a single rope-yarn;
yet, in reality, she was more secure from descending to the abyss below
than many gallantly careering on the waters, their occupants dismissing
all fear, and only calculating upon a quick arrival into port.

The _Circassian_ had sailed from New Orleans, a gallant and
well-appointed ship, with a cargo, the major part of which consisted of
cotton. The captain was, in the usual acceptation of the term, a good
sailor; the crew were hardy and able seamen. As they crossed the
Atlantic, they had encountered the gale to which we have referred, were
driven down into the Bay of Biscay, where, as we shall hereafter
explain, the vessel was dismasted, and sprang a leak, which baffled all
their exertions to keep under. It was now five days since the
frightened crew had quitted the vessel in two of her boats, one of which
had swamped, and every soul that occupied it had perished; the fate of
the other was uncertain.

We said that the crew had deserted the vessel, but we did not assert
that every existing being had been removed out of her. Had such been
the case, we should not have taken up the reader's time in describing
inanimate matter. It is life that we portray, and life there still was
in the shattered hull thus abandoned to the mockery of the ocean. In
the _caboose_ of the _Circassian_, that is, in the cooking-house secured
on deck, and which fortunately had been so well fixed as to resist the
force of the breaking waves, remained three beings--a man, a woman, and
a child. The two first mentioned were of that inferi