My two companions were by my side, safe and
sound, and we all shook hands heartily. There we had to wait for the
steamer that runs twice a month to Cape North, and in the interval I
occupied myself revising this record of our incredible expedition in an
element previously considered inaccessible to man, but to which progress
will one day open up a way.

I may be believed or not, but I know that I have made a journey of
twenty thousand leagues under the sea.

Does the Nautilus still exist? Is Captain Nemo still alive? Was that
awful night in the Maelstrom his last, or is he still pursuing a
terrible vengeance? Will the confessions of his life, which he told me
he had written, and which the last survivor of his fellow-exiles was to
cast into the sea in an air-tight case, ever be found?

This I know, that only two men could have a right to answer the question
asked in the Ecclesiastes three thousand years ago: "That which is far
off and exceeding deep, who can find it out?" These two men are Captain
Nemo and I.

* * * * *

HORACE WALPOLE

Castle of Otranto

Horace Walpole, the third son of Sir Robert Walpole, was born
in 1717. After finishing his education at Eton and Cambridge,
he travelled abroad for some years, principally in Italy,
where he seems to have acquired those tastes for which he
afterwards became so well known. He returned to England in
1741, and took his seat in parliament, but he had no taste for
politics, and six years later he purchased a piece of ground
near Twickenham, and made the principal occupation of his life
the erection and decoration of his famous
mansion--"Strawberry. Hill." "The Castle of Otranto" appeared
in 1764. It was described as a "Gothic Story translated by
William Marshal Gent, from the original Italian of Onuphrio
Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto." But,
emboldened by the success of the work, Walpole in the second
edition acknowledged that he himself was the author. The theme
of the story was suggested to him by a dream, of which he
said, "All I could recover was that I thought myself in an
ancient castle, and that on the uppermost baluster of a great
staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I
sat down and began to write without knowing in the least what
I intended to relate." The tale was th