d that I was following the queer, slinking figure
down our bare little New England street.

He led me to a ship, an old brigantine heavy with age and
barnacles and hung about with the sorriest gray rags of
canvas that ever did duty for sails. No wonder that nine days
out we lost our fore tops'l. But stay; I fear I go too fast!
For you must know that I went aboard that brigantine, and
once aboard I could not go ashore again, partly because the
strange, ill-assorted crew detained me at every turn, and
partly because the longing was so strong upon me to see the
things I had read of so often. And that night found me still
upon the vessel, nosing down to the harbor light, with the
lamps of my father's house winking less and less brightly on
the dim shore astern.

Well, sirs, it would weary you to tell much of that voyage,
and besides, many's the time you yourselves must have
weathered the Horn. For it was 'round Cape Stiff we went--no
Panama Canal in those days--and I served a bitter
apprenticeship on ice-coated yards, clutching numbly at
battering sails frozen stiff as iron. It was Peru we were
bound for,--Peru where the submarine city lay beneath
uncounted fathoms waiting for us. The captain and I were the
only ones Acuma, the half-breed, had taken into his
confidence; all the others sailed on a blind errand, trusting
to the skipper, who was a shrewd man and severe. And the
brigantine wallowed around the Cape and toiled on and on up
the coast, and every day Acuma grew more restless; every day
he cast about the water with eyes that seemed to pierce to
the very bottom of the Pacific.

One day of blue sky and little breeze, when we were pushing
the brigantine with all sails set, Acuma flung himself at a
bound to the quarterdeck, and a moment later the skipper
shouted quick orders that the crew could not understand for
the life of them. For to heave the ship to, just when we all
had been whistling for enough breeze to give her something
more than steerage way, seemed nothing short of insane. Acuma
climbed to the maintop and looked at the coast of Peru with a
telescope, and the captain took bearings with his
instruments.

It was Acuma and I who went over the side in diving suits,
for no others save the captain knew what we sought, as I have
said. Down I went and down, with the weight of water crushing
ever more strongly against me, till