nowy floor as if it lay embedded
in a sheet of flawless crystal; and then again the quivering walls of
weed and sponge would seem to rise ahead as if to bar her way, then
slowly sink astern in the frigate's soundless wake.

But if the strange world beneath was wondrous and fascinating to look
upon, that around was even more so. Three miles away on the starboard
hand a group of green and fertile islands shone like emeralds in the
morning sun. Leaning over the rail, Francis Channing gazed at their
verdant heights and palm-fringed beaches of yellow sand with a feeling
but little short of rapture to a man with a mind so beauty-loving and
poetic as was his. Familiar to the wild bloom and brilliance of the West
Indian islands, the soft tropical beauty of the scene now before him
surpassed all he had ever seen, and, oblivious of the presence and
voices of his brother officers as they conversed near him, he became
lost in reflective and pleased contemplation of the radiant panorama of
land, sea, and almost cloudless sky around him. Thirty miles away,
yet so distinctly defined in the clear atmosphere that it seemed but a
league distant from the ship, a perfect volcanic cone stood abruptly up
from out the deep blue sea, and from its sharp-pointed summit a pillar
of darkly-coloured smoke had risen skywards since early morn; but now as
the wind died away it slowly spread out into a wide canopy of white,
and then sank lower and lower till the pinnacle of the mountain was
enveloped in its fleecy mantle.

As the young officer watched the changes of the smoky pall that
proclaimed the awful and mysterious forces slumbering deep down in the
bosom of the earth, he was suddenly aroused from his reflective mood by
the shrill whistles and hoarse cries of the boatswain's mates, and in
another minute the watch began to shorten sail: a faint greenish tinge
in the western sky, quickly noted by the master, who was an old sailor
in Eastern seas, told of danger from that quarter.

Although the typhoon season had not yet set in, and both Captain Reay
and the master knew that in that latitude (about 4 deg. south) there
was not very much probability of meeting with one, every preparation
was made, as violent squalls and heavy rain, at least, were certain
to follow the greenish warning in the sky. In a very short time their
surmise proved correct, for by four in the afternoon the _Triton_ under
short canvas, was battling with a mountainous sea and fu