where the latest telegrams
were written on a black-board, travellers with anxious faces were
hurrying to and fro. Groups collected about persons who were
better-informed than the rest and who were talking very loudly and
gesticulating. A number of passengers were demanding repayment of the
price of their tickets.

"Why, there's Old Sandstone!" said Simon to himself, as he recognized
one of his former professors at a table in the refreshment-room.

And, instead of avoiding him, as he commonly did when the worthy man
appeared at the corner of some street in Dieppe, he went up to him and
took a seat beside him:

"Well, my dear professor, how goes it?"

"What, is that you, Dubosc?"

Beneath a silk hat of an antiquated shape and rusty with age was a
round, fat face like a village priest's, a face with enormous cheeks
which overlapped a collar of doubtful cleanliness. Something like a
bit of black braid did duty as a necktie. The waist-coat and
frock-coat were adorned with stains; and the over-coat, of a faded
green, had three of its four buttons missing and acknowledged an age
even more venerable than that of the hat.

Old Sandstone--he was never known except by this nickname--had taught
natural science at Dieppe College for the last twenty-five years. A
geologist first and foremost and a geologist of real merit, he owed
his by-name to his investigations of the sedimentary formations of the
Norman coast, investigations which he had extended even to the bottom
of the sea and which, though he was nearly sixty years of age, he was
still continuing with unabated enthusiasm. Only last year, in the
month of September, Simon had seen him, a big, heavy man, bloated with
fat and crippled with rheumatism, struggling into a diver's dress and
making, within sight of Saint-Valery-en-Caux, his forty-eighth
descent. The Channel from Le Havre to Dunkirk and from Portsmouth to
Dover, no longer had any secrets for him.

"Are you going back to Dieppe presently, professor?"

"On the contrary, I have just come from Dieppe. I crossed last night,
as soon as I heard of the wreck of the English fishing-smack, you
know, between Seaford and Cuckmere Haven. I have already begun to make
inquiries this morning, of some people who were visiting the Roman
camp and saw the thing happen."

"Well?" said Simon, eagerly.

"Well, they saw, at a mile from the coast, a whirl of waves and foam
revolving at a dizzy speed round a hollow centre. Then sudd