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ce, ready to devour all hapless criminals who should recklessly attempt to swim away from "durance vile." Indeed, it was owing to the curiosity of a sea-lion that at this point in its long voyage the bottle was saved from destruction. A storm had recently swept the southern seas, and the bottle, making bad weather of it in passing the Falklands, was unexpectedly driven on a lee-shore in attempting to double a promontory. Whether promontories are more capable of resisting the bottle than human beings, I know not; but certain it is that the promontory arrested its progress. It began to clink along the foot of the cliffs at the outermost point with alarming violence; and there can be no reasonable doubt that it would have become a miserable wreck there, if it had not chanced to clink right under the nose of a sea-lion which was basking in the sunshine, and sound asleep on a flat rock. Opening its eyes and ears at the unwonted sound, the lion gazed inquiringly at the bottle, and raised its shaggy front the better to inspect it. Apparently the sight stimulated its curiosity, for, with a roar and a gush of ardent spirit, it plunged into the sea and drove the bottle far down into the deep. Finding, apparently, that nothing came of this terrific onslaught, the lion did not reappear. It sneaked away, no doubt, into some coral cave. But the force of the push sent the bottle a few yards out to sea, and so it doubled the promontory and continued its voyage. Shortly after this, however, a check was put to its progress which threatened to be permanent. In a few places of the ocean there are pools of almost stagnant tracts, of various sizes, which are a sort of eddies caused by the conflicting currents. They are full of seaweed and other drift, which is shoved into them by the currents, and are named Sargasso seas. Some of these are hundreds of miles in extent, others are comparatively small. They bothered the navigators of old, did those Sargasso seas, uncommonly. They are permanent spots, which shift their position so little with the very slight changes in the currents of the sea, that they may be said to be always in the same place. Columbus got into one of these Sargassos--the great Atlantic one that lies between Africa and the West Indies,--and his men were alarmed lest this strange weedy sea should turn out to be the end of the world! Columbus was long detained in this region of stagnation and calm, and so
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