bbly little West Street horse car had reached the White Star dock
by this and the two men stepped off. Steamship sailors, I knew. I had
never seen them before, and have never seen them since; but their
conversation produced a marked impression upon me, and I could not
shake off a feeling--not of itself a remembrance, however--that I had
heard something of the kind before. A submerged rock in mid-Atlantic.
But it was incredible, and at last I put it from my mind as a "galley
yarn."

But next morning it was back, in company with another galley yarn, one
I barely remembered as having heard ten years before from an old
Confederate man-o'-war'sman who had sailed with Semmes in the
_Alabama_. The yarn pertained to the pursuit of a Northern merchant
ship, and I give only the conclusion.

"We were gaining fast," he had said, "and hoped to bring her to before
breakfast; for at daylight she was but three miles or so ahead, every
sail drawing and every detail of spar, canvas, and hull showing clear
in the morning light. And then, while we looked at her, she quickly
settled under, not head first or stern first, as is usual, but on an
even keel. They had no time to start a brace or a halyard; there was
not time for her to answer to her wheel, if it had been shifted. She
just went down as though something had hooked onto her keel and dragged
her under. I never learned her name; but she must have been bound out
of New York or Boston, for some French port in the Channel. We picked
up one of her men, a Dago who couldn't tell her name, and only this
much as to what happened. A ripping, crashing sound began forward and
worked its way aft, ending at the stern, and we could only surmise that
something--a submerged derelict, perhaps--had scraped the bottom out of
her."

Memory is treacherous. In a few days I had forgotten this yarn with the
other, and might never have recalled it had I not ascended to an upper
floor in the lofty Flatiron Building, and looked out of a window at the
loftier, but unfinished, tower of the Metropolitan Building across the
park. It was a damp, dismal day of fog; but at my elevation I could see
clear of it. I was above it, looking over an undulating sea of cloud
bank from which the tower rose, massive and mighty, apparently floating
on end, like an immense spar buoy at the turn of the tide. The rest of
New York lay hidden beneath that silent gray ocean of fog.

Interesting as it was of itself, it was not the sp