n ever forget. I
have written it under the influence of violent emotion. Since then I
have revised the recital; I have read it to Conseil and to the
Canadian. They found it exact as to facts, but insufficient as to
effect. To paint such pictures, one must have the pen of the most
illustrious of our poets, the author of The Toilers of the Deep.

I have said that Captain Nemo wept while watching the waves; his grief
was great. It was the second companion he had lost since our arrival
on board, and what a death! That friend, crushed, stifled, bruised by
the dreadful arms of a poulp, pounded by his iron jaws, would not rest
with his comrades in the peaceful coral cemetery! In the midst of the
struggle, it was the despairing cry uttered by the unfortunate man that
had torn my heart. The poor Frenchman, forgetting his conventional
language, had taken to his own mother tongue, to utter a last appeal!
Amongst the crew of the Nautilus, associated with the body and soul of
the Captain, recoiling like him from all contact with men, I had a
fellow-countryman. Did he alone represent France in this mysterious
association, evidently composed of individuals of divers nationalities?
It was one of these insoluble problems that rose up unceasingly before
my mind!

Captain Nemo entered his room, and I saw him no more for some time.
But that he was sad and irresolute I could see by the vessel, of which
he was the soul, and which received all his impressions. The Nautilus
did not keep on in its settled course; it floated about like a corpse
at the will of the waves. It went at random. He could not tear
himself away from the scene of the last struggle, from this sea that
had devoured one of his men. Ten days passed thus. It was not till
the 1st of May that the Nautilus resumed its northerly course, after
having sighted the Bahamas at the mouth of the Bahama Canal. We were
then following the current from the largest river to the sea, that has
its banks, its fish, and its proper temperatures. I mean the Gulf
Stream. It is really a river, that flows freely to the middle of the
Atlantic, and whose waters do not mix with the ocean waters. It is a
salt river, salter than the surrounding sea. Its mean depth is 1,500
fathoms, its mean breadth ten miles. In certain places the current
flows with the speed of two miles and a half an hour. The body of its
waters is more considerable than that of all the rivers in the globe.
It was o