"You know the name I formerly bore, sir?" Captain Nemo asked.

"I do," answered Cyrus Smith, "and also that of this wonderful submarine vessel

"The 'Nautilus'?" said the captain, with a faint smile.

"The 'Nautilus.'"

"But do you do you know who I am?" "I do."

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'It is, nevertheless, many years since I have held any communication with the inhabited world; three long years have I passed in the depths of the sea, the only place where I have found liberty! Who, then, can have betrayed my secret?"

"A man who was bound to you by no tie, Captain Nemo, and who, consequently, cannot be accused of treachery."

"The Frenchman who was cast on board my vessel by chance, sixteen years since ?" "The same."

"He and his two companions did not perish in the maëlstrom, in the midst of which the Nautilus' was struggling."

"They escaped, and the professor has published a book under the title of 'Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea,' which contains your history."

"The history of a few months only of my life!" interrupted the captain, impetuously. "Wait till you have heard all," he said.

And the captain, in a few concise sentences, ran over the events of his life, relating how he had fought in India, traveled all over the world, and how, failing to find liberty on the earth, he had sought it in his submarine vessel.

The captain had been in the locality of Lincoln, Island for six years, navigating the ocean no longer, but awaiting death, when by chance he observed the descent of the balloon. Clad in his diving-dress, he was walking beneath the water at a few cables' length from the shore of the island, when the engineer was thrown into the sea, and had saved him.

It was he also who had brought back the dog to the Chimneys, who rescued Top from the waters of the lake, who caused to fall at Flotsom Point the case containing so many things useful to the colonists, who conveyed the canoe back into the stream of the Mercy, who cast the cord from the top of Granite House at the time of the attack by the baboons, who made known the presence of Ayrton upon Tabor Island, by means of the document inclosed in the bottle, who caused the explosion of the brig by the shock of a torpedo placed at the bottom of the canal,

who saved Harbert from certain death by bringing the sulphate of quinine; and finally, it was he who had killed the convicts with the electric balls, of which he possessed the secret, and which he employed in the chase of submarine creatures. Thus were explained so many apparently supernatural occurrences, which all proved the generosity and power of the captain. Warned by the approach of death, he had sent for the colonists. After this explanation, Captain Nemo turned to the colonists and said:

"You consider yourselves, gentlemen, under some obligations to me?"

"Captain, believe us that we would give our lives to prolong yours."

"Promise, then," continued Captain Nemo, "to carry out my last wishes, and I shall be repaid for all I have done for you." "We promise," said Cyrus Smith.

Pay attention to my wishes," he continued. "The Nautilus' is imprisoned in this grotto, the entrance of which is blocked up; but, although egress is impossible, the vessel may at least sink in the abyss, and there bury my remains."

The colonists listened reverently to the words of the dying man.

"To-morrow, after my death, Mr. Smith," continued the captain, "yourself and companions will leave the 'Nautilus,' for all the treasures it contains must perish with me. One token will remain. That coffer yonder contains diamonds of the value of many millions. To-morrow you will take the coffer; you will leave the saloon, of which you will close the door; then you will ascend to the deck and you will lower the main-hatch so as entirely to close the vessel."

"It shall be done, captain," answered Cyrus Smith.

"Good. You will then embark in the canoe which brought you' hither; but, before leaving the Nautilus,' go to the stern and there open two large stop-cocks which you will find upon the water-line. The water will penetrate into the reservoirs, and the Nautilus' will gradually sink beneath the water to repose at the bottom of the abyss."

At length, shortly after midnight, a dying light gleamed in Captain Nemo's eyes, and he quietly expired.

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Cyrus Smith and his companions quitted the Nautilus," taking with them the only memento left them by their benefactor, that coffer which contained wealth amounting to millions.

The canoe was now brought round to the stern. There, at the water-line, were two

large stop-cocks, communicating with the reservoirs employed in the submersion of the vessel.

The stop-cocks were opened, the reservoirs filled, and the "Nautilus," slowly sinking, disappeared beneath the surface of the lake.

CHAPTER XII.

AT break of day the colonists regained in silence the entrance of the cavern. It was now low water, and they passed without difficulty under the arcade, washed on the right by the sea.

At nine in the morning the colonists reached Granite House. Their whole attention was now concentrated upon the advancement of the work on the vessel.

The colonists now began to notice the increased violence of the volcano, which grew more and more threatening.

"My friends," said the engineer after several careful examinations, 66 our island is not among those which will endure while this earth endures. It is doomed to more or less speedy destruction, the cause of which it bears within itself, and from which nothing can save it. This cavern stretches under the island as far as the volcano, and is only separated from its central shaft by the wall which terminates it. Now, this wall is seamed with fissures and clefts which already allow the sulphureous gases generated in the interior of the volcano to escape."

During the first week of March appearances again became menacing. Thousands of threads like glass, formed of fluid lava, fell like rain upon the island. The mill, the buildings of the inner court, the stables, were all destroyed. The sublime horror of this spectacle passed all description. During the night it could only be compared to a Niagara of molten fluid, with its incandescent vapors above and its boiling masses below.

During the night of the eighth an enormous column of vapor escaping from the crater rose with a frightful explosion to a height of more than three thousand feet. The wall of the grotto had evidently given way under the pressure of the gases, and the sea, rushing through the central shaft into the igneous gulf, was at once converted into vapor. But the crater could not afford a sufficient outlet for this vapor.

An explosion, which might have been heard at a distance of a hundred miles, shook the air. Fragments of mountains fell into the Pacific, and in a few minutes the ocean rolled over the spot where Lincoln Island once stood.

An isolated rock, thirty feet in length, twenty in breadth, scarcely ten from the water's edge, such was the only solid point which the waves of the Pacific had not engulfed.

On this barren rock they had now existed for nine days. A few provisions taken from the magazine of Granite House before the catastrophe, a little fresh water from the rain which had fallen in a hollow of the rock, was all that the unfortunate colonists possessed. Their last hope, the vessel, had been shattered to pieces. They had no means of quitting the reef; no fire, nor any means of obtaining it. It seemed that they must inevitably perish.

But, on the morning of the 24th of March, Ayrton's arms were extended toward a point in the horizon; he raised himself, at first on his knees, then upright, and his hand seemed to make a signal.

A sail was in sight off the rock. She was evidently not without an object. The reef was the mark for which she was making in a direct line, under all steam, and the unfortunate colonists might have made her out some hours before if they had had the strength to watch the horizon.

"The Duncan!"" murmured Ayrton, and fell back, without sign of life.

It was, in fact, the " Duncan," Lord Glenarvon's yacht, now commanded by Robert, son of Captain Grant, who had been dispatched to Tabor Island to find Ayrton, and bring him back to his native land after twelve years of expiation.

The colonists were saved...

"How could you be aware of the existence of Lincoln Island ?" inquired Cyrus Smith, after they had been taken on board. "It is not even named in the charts."

"I knew of it from a document left by you on Tabor Island," answered Robert Grant, producing a paper which indicated the longitude and latitude of Lincoln Island, "the present residence of Ayrton and five American colonists."

"It is Captain Nemo!" cried Cyrus Smith, after having read the notice.

I NOTICE that Mr. Higginson, in his pleasant paper on Foot Paths, forgot to mention the path that leads to the spring. This is a path with something at the end of it, and the best of good fortune awaits him who walks therein. It is a well-worn path, and though generally up or down a hill, it is the easiest of all paths to travel: we forget our fatigue when going to the spring, and we have lost it when we turn to come away. See with what alacrity the laborer hastens along it, all sweaty from the fields; see the boy or girl running with pitcher or pail; see the welcome shade of the spreading tree that presides over its marvelous birth!

In the woods or on the mountain-side follow the path, and you are pretty sure to find a spring; all creatures are going that way night and day, and they make a path. Á spring is always a vital point in the landscape; it is indeed the eye of the fields, and how often, too, it has a noble eyebrow in the shape of an overhanging bank or ledge. Or else its site is marked by some tree which the pioneer has wisely left standing, and which sheds a coolness and freshness that make the water more sweet. In the shade of this tree the harvesters sit and eat their lunch and look out upon the quivering air of the fields. Here the Sunday saunterer stops and lounges with his book, and bathes his hands and face in the cool fountain. Hither the strawberry-girl comes with her basket and pauses a moment in the green shade. The plowman leaves his plow and in long strides approaches the life-renewing spot, while his team, that cannot follow, look wistfully after him. Here the cattle love to pass the heat of the day, and hither come the birds to wash themselves and make their toilets.

Indeed a spring is always an oasis in the desert of the fields. It is a creative and generative center. It attracts all things to itself, the grasses, the mosses, the flowers, the wild plants, the great trees. The walker finds it out, the camping party seek it, the pioneer builds his hut or his house near it. When the settler or squatter has found a good spring, he has found a good place to begin life; he has found the fountain-head of much that he is seeking in this world. The chances are that he has found a southern and eastern exposure; for it is a fact

that water does not readily flow north; the valleys mostly open the other way; and it is quite certain he has found a measure of salubrity; for where water flows, fever abideth not. The spring, too, keeps him to the right belt, out of the low valley, and off the top of the hill.

Then there seems a kind of perpetual spring-time about the place where water issues from the ground-a freshness and a greenness that are ever renewed. The grass never fades, the ground is never parched or frozen. There is warmth there in winter and coolness in summer. The temperature is equalized. In March or April the spring runs are a bright emerald, while the surrounding fields are yet brown and sere, and in fall they are yet green when the first snow covers them. Thus every fountain by the road-side is a fountain of youth and of life. This is what the old fables finally

mean.

An intermittent spring is shallow; it has no deep root and is like an inconstant friend. But a perennial spring, one whose ways are appointed, whose foundation is established, what a profound and beautiful symbol! In fact there is no more large and universal symbol in nature than the spring, if there is any other capable of such wide and various applications.

In the landscape the spring is the point to start from or to stop at. It is a rendezvous for hunters and explorers and pleasureseekers, and for the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. What preparation seems to have been made for it in the conformation of the ground, even in the deep underlying geological strata! Vast rocks and ledges are piled for it, or cleft asunder that it may find a way. Sometimes it is a trickling thread of silver down the sides of a seamed and scarred precipice. Then again the stratified rock is like a just-lifted lid, from beneath which the water issues. Or it slips noiselessly out of a deep dimple in the fields. Occasionally it bubbles up in the valley as if forced out by the pressure of the surrounding hills. Many springs, no doubt, find an outlet in the beds of the large rivers and lakes, and are unknown to all but the fishes. the fishes. They probably find them out and make much of them. The trout certainly do. Find a place in the creek where a spring issues, or where it flows into it from

a near bank, and you have found a most likely place for trout. They deposit their spawn there in the fall, warm their noses there in winter and cool themselves there in summer. I have seen the patriarchs of the tribe of an old and much-fished stream, seven or eight enormous fellows, congregated in such a place. The boys found it out and went with a bag and bagged them all. In another place a trio of large trout, that knew and despised all the arts of the fishermen, took up their abode in a deep, dark hole in the edge of the wood, that had a spring flowing into a shallow part of it. In midsummer they were wont to come out from their safe retreat and bask in the spring, their immense bodies but a few inches under water. A youth who had many times vainly sounded their dark hiding-place with his hook, happening to come along with his rifle one day, shot the three, one after another, killing them by the concussion of the bullet on the water immediately over them.

In the vicinity of the continents, many springs are no doubt borne directly into the ocean, having no earthly history or career at all, like a child that dies on the day of its birth. Off the coast of Florida many of these submarine springs have been discovered.

It is a pleasant conception, that of the unscientific folk, that the springs are fed directly by the sea, or that the earth is full of veins and arteries that connect with the great reservoir of waters. But when science But when science turns the conception over and makes the connection in the air-disclosing the great water-main in the clouds, and that the mighty engine of the hydraulic system of nature is the sun, the fact becomes even more poetical, does it not? This is one of the many cases where science, instead of curtailing the imagination, makes new and large demands upon it.

The hills are great sponges that do not and cannot hold the water that is precipitated upon them, but that let it filter through at the bottom. This is the way the sea has robbed the earth of its salts, its phosphorus, its lime, and many other mineral elements. It is found that the oldest upheavals, those sections of the country that have been longest exposed to the leeching and washing of the rains, are poorest in those substances that go to the making of the osseous frame-work of man and of the animals. Wheat does not grow well there, and the men born and reared there are apt to have brittle bones VOL. XI.-56.

and defective teeth. An important part of those men went down stream, ages before they were born. The water of such sections is now soft and very pure, free from mineral substances, but not more wholesome on that account.

Ours is eminently a country of big springs. What are our inland lakes but so many vast springs? What mighty springs are Lake Superior and Lake Michigan! The chain of lakes in Western and Middle New York,Cayuga, Seneca, Oneida, Otsego,- with water only a little more opaque than the air; Lakes George and Champlain; the lakes in the Adirondacks that feed the Hudson and the St. Lawrence; the wild moose-haunted and loon-flecked lakes of Northern Maine,—all these are not only reservoirs, but in most cases are vast springs as well, scooped out of the plains or the valleys. The small sky-blue lakes, too, on the mountain ranges, as if some god had smote the rock and turned it into water are springs, ice-cold some of them. Such is Lake Mohunk in the Shawangunk range in Southern New York. The mountain stops short, leaving a perpendicular face of rock five or six hundred feet high, and there where the rock went down is the lake, like a jewel in a helmet.

The gigantic springs of the country that have not been caught in any of the great natural basins, are mostly confined to the limestone region of the Middle and Southern States, the valley of Virginia and its continuation and deflections into Kentucky, Tennessee and Northern Alabama and Georgia. Through this belt are found the great caves and the subterranean rivers. . The waters have here worked like enormous moles, and have honey-combed the foundations of the earth. They have great highways beneath the hills. Water charged with carbonic acid gas has a very sharp tooth and a powerful digestion, and no limestone rock can long resist it. Sherman's soldiers tell of a monster spring in Northern Alabama,-a river leaping full-grown from the bosom of the earth as Minerva from the brain of Jupiter; and of another at the bottom of a large, deep pit in the rocks, that continues its way under-ground.

The Valley of the Shenandoah is remarkable for its large springs. The town of Winchester, a town of several thousand inhabitants, is abundantly supplied with water from a single spring that issues on higher ground near by. Several other springs in the vicinity afford rare mill-power.

At

it

ment.

There is a famous spring at San Antonio, Texas, which is described by that excellent traveler, Frederick Law Olmsted. "The "The whole river," he says, "gushes up in one sparkling burst from the earth, with all the accessories of smaller springs, moss, pebbles, foliage, seclusion, etc. Its effect is overpowering. It is beyond your possible conception of a spring."

Of like copiousness and splendor is the Caledonia spring, or springs, in Western New York. They give birth to a whitepebbled, transparent stream several rods wide and two or three feet deep, that flows 80 barrels of water per second, and is alive with trout. The trout are fat and gamy even in winter.

The largest spring in England, called the Well of St. Winifred at Holywell, flows less than three barrels per second. I recently went many miles out of my way to see the famous trout spring in Warren County, New Jersey. This spring flows about one thousand gallons of water per minute, which has a uniform temperature of 50° winter and summer. It is near the Musconetcong Creek, which looks as if it were made up of similar springs. On the parched and sultry summer day upon which my visit fell, it was well worth walking many miles just to see such a volume of water issue from the ground. I felt with the boy Petrarch, when he first beheld a famous spring, that "Were I master of such a fountain I would prefer it to the finest of cities." A large oak leans down over the spring and affords an abundance of shade. The water does not bubble up, but comes straight out with great speed like a courier with important news, and as if its course under-ground had been a direct and an easy one for a long existence. Springs that issue in this way have a sort of vertebra, a ridgy and spine-like center that suggests

What would one not give for such a spring in his back-yard, or front-yard, or anywhere near his house, or in any of his fields ? Onewould be tempted to move his house to it, if the spring could not be brought to the house. Its mere poetic value and suggestion would be worth all the art and ornament to be had. It would irrigate one's heart and character as well as his acres. Then one might have a Naiad Queen to do his churning and to saw his wood. "Make the gods themselves do your chore," says Emerson. Yes, or the nymphs either.

I know a homestead situated on one of the picturesque branch valleys of the Housatonic, that has such a spring flowing by the foundation walls of the house, and not a little of the strong overmastering local attachment that holds the owner there is born of that-his native spring. He could not, if he would, break from it. He says that when he looks down into it he has a feeling that he is an amphibious animal that has somehow got stranded. A long gentle flight of stone steps leads from the back porch down to it under the branches of a lofty elm. It wells up through the white sand and gravel as through a sieve, and fills the broad space that has been arranged for it so gently and imperceptibly that one does not suspect its copiousness until he has seen the overflow. It turns no wheel, yet it lends a pliant hand to many of the affairs of that household. It is a refrigerator in summer and a frost-proof envelope in winter, and a fountain of delights the year round. Trout come up from the Weebutook River and dwell there and become domesticated, and take lumps of butter from your hand, or rake the ends of your fingers if you tempt them. It is a kind of sparkling and ever-washed larder. Where are the berries? where is the butter; the milk, the steak, the melon, the cold dish? In the spring. It preserves, it ventilates, it cleanses. It is a board of health and general purveyor. It is equally for use and for pleasure. Nothing degrades it, and nothing can enhance its beauty. It is picture and parable, and an instrument of music. It is servant and divinity in one. The milk of forty cows is cooled in it, and never a drop gets into the cans, though they are plunged to the brim. It is as insensible to drought and rain as to heat and cold. It is planted upon the sand and yet it abideth like a house upon a rock. It evidently has some relation to a little