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“Where did you say all this is to be seen?” asked the Daughter of the House, who loved all lovely things.

“Oh, in a good many places in warm climates,” said John. “But, now I come to think of it, there was one place where I saw more beautiful sights, more grand and wonderful sights, under the water than I believe anybody ever saw before! Would you like me to tell you about it?”

“Indeed–I–would!” said she, taking off her hat.

John now began to sharpen the end of his pea-stick. “It was a good many years ago,” said he, “more than twenty–and I was then a seafaring man. I was on board a brig, cruising in the West Indies, and we were off Porto Rico, about twenty miles northward, I should say, when we ran into something in the night,–we never could find out what it was,–and we stove a big hole in that brig which soon began to let in a good deal more water than we could pump out. The captain he was a man that knew all about that part of the world, and he told us all that we must work as hard as we could at the pumps, and if we could keep her afloat until he could run her ashore on a little sandy island he knew of not far from St. Thomas, we might be saved. There was a fresh breeze from the west, and he thought he could make the island before we sank.

“I was mighty glad to hear him say this, for I had always been nervous when I was cruising off Porto Rico. Do you know, miss, that those waters are the very deepest in the whole world?”

“No,” said she; “I never heard that.”

“Well, they are,” said John. “If you should take the very tallest mountain there is in any part of the earth and put it down north of Porto Rico, so that the bottom of it shall rest on the bottom of the sea, the top of that mountain would be sunk clean out of sight, so that ships could sail over it just as safely as they sail in any part of the ocean.

“Of course a man would drown just as easily in a couple of fathoms of water as in this deep place; but it is perfectly horrible to think of sinking down, down, down into the very deepest water-hole on the face of the whole earth.”

“Didn’t you have any boats?” asked the young lady.

“We hadn’t any,” said John. “We had sold all of them about two months before to a British merchantman who had lost her boats in a cyclone. One of the things our captain wanted to get to St. Thomas for was to buy some more boats. He heard he could get some cheap ones there.

“Well, we pumped and sailed as well as we could, but we hadn’t got anywhere near that sandy island the captain was making for, when, one morning after breakfast, our brig, which was pretty low in the water by this time, gave a little hitch and a grind, and stuck fast on something; and if we hadn’t been lively in taking in all sail there would have been trouble. But the weather was fine, and the sea was smooth, and when we had time to think about what had happened we were resting on the surface of the sea, just as quiet and tranquil as if we had been a toy ship in a shop-window.

“What we had stuck on was a puzzle indeed! As I said before, our captain knew all about that part of the sea, and, although he knew we were in shallow soundings, he was certain that there wasn’t any shoal or rock thereabout that we could get stuck on.

“We sounded all around the brig, and found lots of water at the stern, but not so much forward. We were stuck fast on something, but nobody could imagine what it was. However, we were not sinking any deeper, and that was a comfort; and the captain he believed that if we had had boats we could row to St. Thomas; but we didn’t have any boats, so we had to make the best of it. He put up a flag of distress, and waited till some craft should come along and take us off.