THE SURGEON'S TALES.

THE DIVER AND THE BELL.

I have witnessed various states of the mind and body of the wonderfully constructed creature, man; and have written down those cases where the two mutually operate upon each other, in such a manner as to bring out startling characteristics, which, by many, are scarcely believed to belong to our nature. I am now to exhibit a case, where an extreme love of mental excitement produced by extraordinary sights and positions, gave rise to a species of disease, which we have no name for in our nosology. The individual was a Mr. Y——, a gentleman of fortune, who came to reside in the town where I practise. When I first visited him, I found him a poor emaciated creature, sick of the world, dying of ennui, thirsting after morbid excitements, yet shuddering at the recollection of what he had witnessed. I saw at once that he was a victim of some engrossing master passion, that had fed upon the natural feelings and sentiments, till his whole soul was under the power and operation of the presiding demon; and got him to give me an account of the manner in which he became enthralled.

Even now, he began—and he trembled as the thoughts he was to evolve recurred to him, even now, though it is fully two years since I was placed in one of the most extraordinary situations in which man was ever doomed to be, I cannot call up again the ideas and sensations which then occupied my mind, without trembling, and endeavouring to fly, as it were, from myself, and, by seeking for natural thoughts among natural appearances and converse, rear up again the belief that I am a regularly organized being, capable of again becoming happy among the sons of men. But the thought still haunts me as a spectre, that I may be once more, by some other cause not less fortuitous than that which then took me out of the region of experience, precipitated, in spite of all my care, into some new position, where the feelings which we are led to consider as a part of our nature, may be so entirely changed that no new world we are capable of conceiving any notion of, could possibly produce a more extraordinary disruption of all the old workings of the brain. Oh! it is a fearful thought, but one seldom entertained by the slaves of experience. Changes occur daily to all men; but, in the general case, each mere worldly position of ever-changing circumstances, possesses so much of the form and character of some prior one, that we are very soon reconciled to the idea of a variety composed of a mere mutation of the mixture of old elements. The mind, looked upon as a microcosm peopled by the representations of things that be—of the past and possible, of the future and probable—is held to be our own little world, with which, and all its inhabitants, we are or may be familiar; we forget that there are recesses in it, or capabilities within it, that may contain or produce things as new as striking, as horrible as if they were the creations of an unknown power, out of elements we never saw or heard of. A sane person, living and acting in the world, may be for a time mad, but with the difference, that, while ordinary maniacs know not their condition, he may be conscious of a thinking identity, while all his thoughts seem to be imposed upon him by other powers than those that regulate this sphere, and he is himself, what he was, but placed in a new world, and acted on by new impulses at which he shudders, but which he is sternly bound to receive and feel. What a view does this open up to the state of man in this lower world!—how much is there in it of a cause of humiliation and trembling. I am myself, from what I suffered, altogether a changed being; having no faith in the stability of things; conceiving myself placed among dangerous rocks and precipices, from which, in the next moment, I may fall, I know not where; and eyeing with doubt and dismay even the most composed and settled of all the circumstances of life. He is a happy man who is doomed to pass from the cradle to the grave, without having cause to experience the faithlessness of experience, who has only read of those dreadful disruptions of the mind and feelings, that scatter the old elements, in order that some new consolidating power may throw them into forms and combinations a thousand times more horrible than all the creation of dark brooding incubus.

Like most other men of an ardent and imaginative temperament, I was dissatisfied with the dull routine of ordinary things. I used to feed my fancy with creatures of the possible, and, without the aid of artificial stimulants of the brain, often conjured up imaginary beings and predicaments which had a charm for me, I cannot very well explain or account for. I cared little for dreams, or the artificial combinations produced by narcotics; they had too little of reality for me: I never was satisfied with a mere effort of the fancy, where the judgment was entirely in abeyance, or at least mocked by what it had no control over. In the world around me, I found food for my appetite; whatever I saw or heard of the real, I wrought upon in my solitary moments, till I produced creations, that, being actually within the limits of the possible, I could survey with the satisfaction that I was contemplating what might or would be actually experienced in some future stage of the world. Yet it is a fact—and no one who knows anything of morbid indulgences of this kind can doubt it—that it is questionable, even to myself, whether, upon the whole, I ever derived any real pleasure from these moods of the mind. The imaginary positions I loved most, were generally of the painful kind: the greater the sufferings of the personages concerned in my various plots of combined circumstances, the more was my propensity gratified. From this morbid state of excitement, I was, of course, often precipitated, by the mere decay of the cerebral energy that fed it; and when I was forced again to contemplate and mix with the common affairs of life, I felt the contrast operate to the disadvantage of even the most stirring incidents that are daily befalling mankind. I was, indeed, much in the position of those who stimulate the fancy by extraneous applications; all the boasted efforts of judgment I tried to mix up with and control the workings of my fancy, I found were but a species of delusive energies, to take myself out of a class of dreamers I heartily despised. I was, in fact, just as complete a visionary as they—with this difference,—I thought I required to satisfy the condition of a waking judgment, which, after all, had very little to do in the matter.

There was, however, one peculiarity of my character not found among my class of visionaries. I was always anxious to throw myself into situations that, being new and wonderful, might supply my mind with a species of experience, from which, in my after moods, I might draw, as from a real source, all the substrata of my creations. I visited asylums, executions, and dissecting-rooms; accompanied Mr ——, the aeronaut, in his ascent from Manchester; when on the Continent, I stood below the falls of Terne, and descended into that hell upon earth, the mines of Presburg; yet I must avow that I was a coward; the very experiences I courted, I often trembled at, not only at the time when the objects were busy with my senses, and sending their influences through my nerves to my brain, but afterwards, when I called up the images to my mind, and threw them into the forms that obeyed the creative power of my fancy. I was also, in some degree, peculiar in caring little for the works of fictioneers; if I were to try to account for this, I would trace the cause to the same disposition of mind that led me to despise all artificial modes of stimulus. The fancies of other men roused my scepticism; my own, founded always on experience, and never going beyond the province of the possible, seemed to me to possess a reality sufficient to satisfy the conditions of my deluded judgment. It had been fortunate for me had I been less exclusive in my resources of gratification; and oh, how dearly I paid for these my imaginative flights, may too soon be made apparent to those who follow me in my narrative, to be benefited, I trust, from my errors.

I had nearly exhausted all my stock of real perceptions, and was beginning to be forced to recombine my old thoughts, so as to produce new associations of the strange and wonderful, when I accidentally met with Mr W——, a gentleman well known in the world of experimental science by the improvements he made on the diving-bell, in addition to the contributions of Rennie and Spalding. I was then living at E——, and he was on his way to Portsmouth, to superintend the workings of a bell that had been sent thither for the purpose of recovering the specie contained in the ship A——, which had been sunk on her return from South America. He described to me the construction of the bell, the manner in which it was worked, and the many extraordinary sights that the divers saw in the course of their submarine operations. I told him that I had accompanied Mr ——, the aeronaut, in his ascent from Manchester, and had often felt a strong desire to reverse my former flight, and descend into the great deep, to see its wonders, and compare my sensations with those I had already experienced in the air. He told me that my wish might easily be gratified; adding that, although he had never been beyond the top of a steeple, he could take it upon him to assure me, that the feeling of vastness and sublimity induced by an aerial ascent, was almost in direct contrast to the sensations of the diver—the one being comparable to the effects produced by the enlarged views of generalization, indulged in by speculative ontologists—the other, to those that result from the inductive process of searching into the physical arcana of nature. He was not aware of the bent of my mind, or his comparison might have been made more suitable to the feelings of one who cared far less for science than the monstrous things of thaumatology; but he had said enough, or rather the mere mention of the subject was sufficient to fire my fancy; and, after he left me, I brooded continually on the subject of the bed of the great deep—that world unexplored by man, where strange creatures obey laws unknown to us, and feed on the dead bodies of those who relentlessly pursue them; where the bones of the men of distant nations meet and cross each other—those of the sons of science and those of the unlettered negro, bound together by tangled sea-weed—orbless skulls, the receptacles of unclassified reptiles, lying on the treasures that the living man sighed to bring home, as the reward of his toils in foreign lands; and where the very mystery of the unexplored recesses throws a green shadow over the strange inhabitants and things of the earth, buried there for countless ages, that makes the whole watery world like a vision of enchantment. I had found a new source of unthought of reveries, that would supply my enraptured hours with aliment according to my wishes. The objects to be seen within the short space circumscribed by the bell, or comprehended within the range of its lights, could not be many; but there was the new mode, as it were, of existence—the breathing under water, the living in the element of the creatures of the deep, all the multifarious sensations that would spring up in the mind and body, as if some new power of life and feeling penetrated to the very well-springs of existence.

A letter from Mr W—— soon afterwards invited me to Portsmouth, from which I was then not far distant. The divers had been for some time busy; a great part of the wreck had been laid open, and some curious discoveries been made, and treasures recovered, which inspired the workmen with ardour. On the following day, I was at the scene of operation. When I went on board of the lighter, from which the bell was suspended, I examined the apparatus. The bell was then down, the men stood holding the crane, and listening attentively to hear the signals that were, every now and then, coming from the divers. At a little distance was the apparatus of the air-pump, which several other workmen were busily engaged working. The whole scene was calculated to produce an extraordinary impression on a beholder. The sky was hazy; the air thick and oppressive, from the heat of the sun acting upon the dense medium of a mist that hung on the water; there was not a breath of wind to ruffle the surface of the calm deep; the only sound heard was the whizzing of the air-pump, and the clang of the apparatus by which it was worked. There was nothing seen of the bell; it was far down in the bosom of the deep. The chain, by which it was suspended, dipped into the sea and disappeared, carrying the mind with it down to the grim recesses where living, breathing men were buried. Clear as the waters were, the eye could not reach the depth to which the huge living cemetery had descended; a recoiling feeling, which made the heart leap, followed the effort to trace the chain down, down through the translucent sea. The red sun, struggling through the mist, was reflected in a lurid glow from the surface of the deep. As the air-pump ceased for short intervals, and absolute silence reigned around, a clang, unlike any sounds of earth, came upon the ear—

It was a signal from those in the bell; it seemed as if the sea trembled, and old Ocean spoke from the deeper recesses of his soul. The sound struck the ear as something unnatural, or what might be conceived to issue from a sepulchre when the spirits of the dead hold converse in the still night. The signal was answered; and, in a short time afterwards, there were heard three successive strokes quickly repeated—clang, clang, clang. The quickness of the strokes, and the strangeness of the sound, coming whence such sounds are never heard, seemed the doom-peal of these men.

But the sound told other things to the workmen: the wheel began to revolve; after many revolutions, the waters began to boil as if moved by a ground swell, and the large black engine appeared rising up like a mighty monster of the deep.

When the bell was fairly suspended above the water, the crane was pulled round, and the heavy appendage was wheeled over the deck of the lighter. There were three individuals in it, seated high and dry upon the vis-à-vis seats. There were instruments of various kinds hung round the inside, the uses of which were explained to me. The men told me that a storm, a few days before, had so broken up and removed the wreck, that it would be necessary to pull the lighter a little farther to the eastward. It came out, too, with some indications of terror which they attempted to conceal, that the dead bodies of those who had perished in the cabin were beginning to make their appearance, now that the hull was broken. Mr W—— looked at me askance, as if to ascertain whether that circumstance would have any effect in making me forego my purpose in descending; and, doubtless, he observed me shudder. But he knew me not: the expedition possessed greater, perhaps grimmer charms to me on that account: the horror that passed over me, as I heard the statement of the men, was only an indication that my zeal was stirred by the expectation of food for my depraved appetite.

"Dead men are not the most dangerous enemies of divers," said Mr W——, with a grim smile. "We have sometimes greater reason to be alarmed from inroads of the living inhabitants of the waters. It is not a week yet since the fearful tenth signal rung from the deep; and, upon the machine being raised in great alarm by the workers of the crane, it was ascertained that a shoal of finners (some of them fourteen feet long) had passed close by the mouth of the bell, with a noise like the rushing of a mighty army. But the alarm was greater on the side of the creatures themselves: on observing the bell with the men in it, they lashed their tails with fearful fury, till the waters seemed to boil in the midst of them, and the whole host were enshrined in a thick muddy medium that prevented the divers from seeing an inch before them. The sound, meanwhile, was like that of thunder—snorting, lashing, and shrill cries, produced by some action of their breathing organs, were mixed together; and the confusion into which they were thrown precipitated many of them on the sides of the bell, which being at the time suspended from within five feet of the ground, swung from side to side in such a manner as to rouse the fears of the workmen above before the signal reached their ears. In a short time afterwards, when the bell was raised, we saw the shoal making with great speed to the westward, blowing, as they careered onwards, with a loud noise. I never knew of a circumstance of the same kind before; and to-day you will not, I trust, be alarmed by such visitors."

This statement roused my fears, already excited by what I had heard of the dead bodies that lay on the wreck; but I adhered to my purpose. The lighter was moved about twenty feet eastward, and the bell was again swung round to be let down, it being resolved that I should accompany the divers in their next descent. I watched the operations with an interest derived from my expected position in the same circumstances with these fearless men. The huge mass hung in the air, dangling over the smooth surface of the sea; and the signal being given, was plunged down. In a moment it had disappeared, and a heavy mass of waters rushed on, swelling and boiling in the abyss, that seemed to have entombed the daring adventurers. The rolling off of the chain in a long succession of coils, and the disappearance of link after link, filled the mind with a shuddering impression of the depth to which they were attaining. The signal was again given; the air-pump began to play and whiz, and my thoughts, burdened with the superstitious fear produced by the narratives I had heard, took a new direction, picturing the men among the floating bodies of the dead mariners, which, among the green lights of the sea, would appear invested with additional horrors—the monsters of the deep playing round them, or feasting upon the decayed limbs—numberless crabs, sea urchins, and centipedes, crawling on members once consecrated to beauty. The silence on board the lighter aided my fancy in its gloomy revels; and when the clang of the hammer on the bell announced the wish of the divers to rise again, I started from a seat on a coil of ropes which I had in my musings taken possession of—having been oblivious of the intervening half hour, during which I had been shadowing forth the secrets of the green charnel-house, with its surface lying smiling before me in the lurid glare of the still enshrouded sun.

At last, I was called to take my seat in the bell. One of the men came out to make room for me; but, before I entered, the crane was swung round to the west side of the lighter, as the men reported that a more likely field of investigation lay in that direction, where they had observed a bright body which they took for a mass of glittering specie, probably rolled out of the packages, and lying there from its greater specific gravity. On mounting up into the bell, where the two remaining workmen were refreshing themselves with brandy to recover the play of the lungs, which, in the last descent, had suffered from a deficiency of oxygen, I felt a creeping sensation pass over me, in spite of my efforts to be calm and firm. This I attributed to the already excited state of my fancy, from the long train of musings I had indulged in over the green deep. In my ascent with the aeronaut, I experienced a sensation in some degree similar to that feeling of lofty awe which accompanies the expectation of the grand impulse of sublimity—τον σφοδρον και ενθουσιαστικον παθος; but now the action of the heart seemed tending towards a collapse rather than a swell: I felt already the chilling effect of the cold element before I had descended into its womb. I looked round me with a nervous eye, and threw the colours of my fancy on even common objects. The dull yolks of glass placed round the sides to give light, pale and lustreless—the iron tools, wet and brown with rust—the black leather flasks of spirits—the big hammer used for signals of distress—were all strange and invested with new characters; and the two men, Jenkins, an Englishman, and Vanderhoek, a German, with sallow countenances, rendered paler than usual by the effects of the confined air, seemed rather to belong to the watery element from which they had emerged, than to the fair and smiling earth. I attempted to look unconcernedly; but the German, as he was lifting his flask to his head, scanned me with a ludicrous gaze, and, whether it was that the brandy had, in some degree, inclined him to a merriment that in my eyes seemed like the grin of a demon, or that he wished to let me hear the ringing sound of the bell when the human voice echoed within it, I know not; but he accompanied his potations with a stanza of Burger's famous Zechlied:—

And, finishing the verse, he looked again at me, to notice the effect produced on me by the reverberation of the tones, which, reflected from all sides, mixed as it were in the middle, and loaded the ear with a confused ringing noise, similar to what I once heard when nearly drowned in the Thames. If the man had had any intention to increase my alarm, he could not have taken a more effectual way of compassing his intention; for his language—the true and natural diction of spirits—responded to by the confused ringing echoes of the bell, and acting upon a mind already enervated by the weight of the genius of superstition, appeared to be all that was necessary to complete the alarm which I in vain attempted to conceal.

"All ready, Vanderhoek?" cried Mr W——.

"Ja, ja, herr," responded Vanderhoek. "Pull away, Crane-meistern."

And as the men began to work, he dashed carelessly into another stanza of his favourite ballad. I know not if you are acquainted with German; but I cannot resist the desire of gratifying my own ears with a repetition of the sounds of the thrilling consonants which produced so great an effect on me on that occasion. His voice was rough and guttural:—

I would have called out to the man to cease his singing, had I not been afraid of being set down for a coward. The continued sound within prevented me from observing the motion of the bell, as it gradually swung off the deck; but the increasing novelty of my situation, as I saw myself suspended over the calm sea into which I was immediately to be plunged, fixed my attention, while it increased my nervousness. I would now have retreated, had it been in my power. The calculated knowledge of the process of submersion, and of my absolute safety under the laws of hydraulics, lost so much of its power under the reigning influence of the natural instinctive horror of being plunged into the womb of the ocean, that I thought myself on the eve of being drowned; and the same feeling I had experienced when struggling half-dead with the waters of the Thames took hold of me by anticipation. Meanwhile, the German started broken snatches of his song; the bell was gradually descending; the space of pure light between the rim and the green surface of the sea was growing every minute less and less. It was upon that decreasing circle of air that my eye was most intensely fixed; it grew brighter as the inside of the bell grew darker, till in a moment it appeared like a bright line of gold-coloured light.

"There," said Jenkins to me, in a loud tone. "That is the last glimpse. This is the most trying moment for inexperienced divers, when the last beam of day is extinguished."

I could not reply to him. The circle had disappeared; the water was below our feet; we were partially submerged. I looked up to the yolks of glass, but the light that struggled through them was so pale and sickly that I turned my eyes to the sea below me as a relief to my confined vision. We were now fast descending—one by one the gas lights were changed from their dim paleness to a green hue, the same as that of the sea below us, and, in an instant after, I heard a loud whizzing, which was produced by the displaced body of waters rushing impetuously into the void made by the descending bell. The sound made me instinctively turn my head upwards, as if I had been in the attitude of addressing the King of the heavens, whom I had left in the regions of upper air. I grew dizzy, and thought I would have fallen from the bench, down into the bottom of the sea. My nervousness made me grasp firmly the plank, as my only means of safety from what I conceived to be impending destruction. Whether that sound then ceased, or my hearing became more obtuse, I know not; but the first thing, after a few minutes, that I was conscious of was the grasp of the hand of Jenkins, who held me firm by the arm, and the guttural sounds of the German, as he still carelessly sung detached lines of his ballad. On looking up, the green lights swam in my eyes; but the whizzing sound had greatly ceased; and I directed again my gaze to the apparently bottomless element below, which was as calm as glass, and through which I saw, flying past the mouth of the bell, innumerable fishes, reflecting, as they darted off, a thousand varied hues, in the midst of the green medium through which they hurried.

The continued descent was made apparent to the eye by the progress of the rim of the bell through the water, and indicated, in another form, by the creaking sound of the crane on the lighter, which, rendered indistinct by the medium of the water, seemed to come from miles distant. Though partially recovered from the first effects of the submersion, I had no proper idea of time, and there was no mode of measuring the depth. It seemed to me as if we had descended many furlongs, though we had not got beyond ten fathoms: I could not get quit of the idea, though I arranged my thoughts in the process of calculation. Jenkins had now let go my arm, as he saw that I was able to sit without danger of falling; and the German was busy peering through his bushy eyebrows down into the deep, as if he expected soon "to see the land." I almost instinctively gazed down for the same object, and it was not without an effort at discrimination by the power of my judgment that I discovered myself seeking a vision of the bottom of the sea, as if it had been a haven for a shipwrecked mariner in distress. While my eyes were thus fixed on the waters—in which I could see nothing but the swarms of fishes flying past, or reeling in the confusion of terror—I was startled, almost to falling off the bench, by a loud reverberating clang on the side of the bell. My first impression was, that the bell had struck on a rock; and I turned fearfully to seek the eye of Jenkins. He held the large hammer in his hand with which he had given the stroke. He told me that he wanted more air, and that this was the signal to the workers of the air-pump. His eye was fixed on the air holes, with which the pipes communicated. I thought he appeared alarmed; he exchanged a look with Vanderhoek, and the eye of the latter was soon also fixed on the same spot. We were yet still descending, and the German, turning round, pointed down. I followed his finger, and saw a thick, hazy-like appearance, as if the waters were troubled, and masses of long sea-weed brushed against the rim of the bell. Vanderhoek immediately seized the hammer, rang two loud peals, and the motion downwards ceased. We hung suspended in the sea, I know not how many fathoms down. A loud hissing sound came from the air-valves; but it was every moment interrupted, as if some part of the apparatus failed in its continuous working. The eyes of both Jenkins and Vanderhoek were again intensely fixed upon the holes; it was too manifest to me that they both saw something wrong in the working of the air pumps, though they said nothing to me; and, indeed, I was so much affected by their ominous looks that I could put no question to them.

"Is there not an under current here, Karl?" said Jenkins, attempting to appear composed.

"Ja," replied Vanderhoek; "see, there is von gut sign. The meer-weeds are drifting to the east; and see, there is von piece of the wreck moving from the west."

I looked down, and saw the edge of a piece of black timber making its appearance within the verge of the rim of the bell; but, in consequence of the small angle afforded by our pent-up position, we could not observe more than two inches of it. Large bushes of confusedly entangled sea-weed were brushing past, and, as they stuck about the rim, darkened the interior so much that we could scarcely see each other. These seemed of but small importance to Jenkins, who was evidently still unsatisfied with the working of the pumps, and got upon his feet to examine into the cause of their irregular and interrupted action. It struck me, at this time, that Jenkins' question about the current had more meaning in it than was made apparent to me: I suspected that he entertained fears that the air tubes had got entangled in some way with the bell chain. His efforts did not seem to produce any greater regularity of action in the tubes; the whizzing noise continued every now and then to be interrupted; at one time, it stopped altogether for about a minute. The machinery was working reluctantly, and with a struggling difficulty that was apparent to the eye and ear; but other proofs of a more decided and fearful kind were awaiting us. I felt a painful load at my breast, as if I wanted air; my respiration became quick and unsatisfactory; a swimming of the head came over me; I could scarcely see my companions without great effort to fix my wavering vision. The darkness at the mouth of the bell continued to increase; the piece of the wreck was moving slowly under us; the weeds were increasing. I could perceive that Vanderhoek was also labouring for breath; Jenkins, relinquishing his efforts at the air tube mouths, turned, looked wildly at his neighbour, and, staggering down upon the bench, struggled to get hold of the hammer, which, when he grasped it tremblingly, fell out of his hands down into the bottom of the sea.

"In the name of God! what is the meaning of all this, Jenkins?" I cried, in a voice that was choked for want of air.

He lay upon the bench, and gasped, apparently unable to speak; he looked to Vanderhoek, and pointed to an instrument in the shape of a mattock—shaking his hand, and muttering indistinctly, "Haste! haste!"

The sign and words were perfectly understood by Vanderhoek as well as by myself. I looked on, with the intense agony of fear and impeded lungs, and added some irregular and confused signs (for my voice died in my choking throat) to the German to obey the request of his neighbour—but these were unnecessary: the man himself saw the fearful position in which we were placed, with as keen a perception of the danger, and as anxious a wish to remove it, as either of us. He was, however, struggling for want of air to a greater extent than either Jenkins or myself. His face was swollen and blue, his mouth open, his eyes protruding from his head, his breast heaving like one under the weight of the angel of death. Yet he tried to combat the antagonist powers of cruel fate; and, raising his body from the bench, he bent forward to clutch the mattock, with which to give the clangs that formed the signal to raise us from our water-bound prison. He had to reach over the body of Jenkins, who lay coiled up, almost lifeless from suffocation; then, in his efforts to get at the instrument, he fell down through the mouth of the bell, and stuck fast among the tangled weed. At this very instant, I heard again the sound of the air-pump whizzing in my ears: it came like the music of angels; and, while Vanderhoek hung fast by a rope that was attached to the bench, I felt the inspiring power of the oxygen coming through the air tubes: my breast rose—my lungs inhaled the sweet aliment—I felt strength infused into my blood and nerves—and, raising myself, laid hold of Vanderhoek; but my energy failed in the effort that exceeded my powers; he fell from my grasp, and plunged overhead among the waters and loose weeds by the side of the dark piece of the wreck, that still seemed to move, though almost imperceptibly, to the east. It was a little time before he came to the surface again, which satisfied me that we were still a considerable way from the bottom, notwithstanding of the accumulation of algæ that had deceived us into a contrary opinion. When his head again appeared within the bell, I was struck fearfully by the horrid expression of his face, which, pale before, now looked green and hideous through the wreaths of weed that hung round his hair. The influx of atmospheric air partially revived his energies for self-preservation; then laying hold of the rope, he got a clutch of the bench, and clambered up. He seemed shocked by some cause of terror, even greater than the danger to which we were yet exposed.

"Shrecken! shrecken!" he muttered, with difficulty. "There is von corpse of a woman there—there—down in the wreck!"

And he pointed to the black fragment of the broken ship that lay below us.

"That is nothing, man," said I. "Give the signal, if you can. See, the air-pump has stopped again. The men in the lighter know not our peril."

He attempted again to seize the mattock, and succeeded in grasping it; but the small supply of air that had been sent us by the temporary opening of the impeded tube, had been only sufficient to revive us slightly; and the suddenness with which his powers were again prostrated, by the recurring weakness that succeeded the cessation of the supply of the natural aliment of the lungs, prevented him from imparting strength to the signal. He gave one weak blow on the side of the bell, and the instrument fell out of his nerveless hands upon the bench. In a few moments more he was stretched beside Jenkins. I myself now tried to lift my arms to seize the instrument. I succeeded only in placing my hands upon it—I was unable to grasp it, and fell, with my back on the side of the bell, powerless, and struggling, with open mouth and heaving sternum, for what came not—a breath of living air.

We must, at this time, have been fully twenty minutes under water; and, as it was our intention to have been an hour, there seemed to be no chance of our being drawn up until we had all expired. I saw plainly, by the noises that came from the tubes, that the men conceived they were working regularly; and, so long as no signal was heard, they would work on, ignorant of the dreadful situation in which we lay. I cast my eyes on my companions. They lay like dead men; my only wonder, now that I can calmly think of the subject, is, that they still kept upon the seats, and did not tumble into the deep. I had scarcely any power of thinking. I sat, writhing under the spasmodic action of suffocation, my eyes fixed in the sockets, my brain swimming, and a burning sensation, like that which attends a paroxysm of brain fever, shooting through the recesses of thought. The recollection of that moment is even yet madness. The bell was almost dark, and the green light that came through the yolks of glass, fell faintly on the blue swollen faces of my companions, who I thought were dead. I had still power to observe that there was a new feature rising in that unprecedented situation of man's sufferings. Was it possible, it may fairly be asked, that fate had it in store to add to these agonies?

While thus I sat fixed immovably by weakness and despair, I observed that the waters were rising visibly upon us, probably from the absorption of the small quantity of oxygen that remained in the tainted air around us. It had risen up half way between the rim and the seats, and was gradually gaining upon me. A foot more would bring it to the level of where I sat. My feet were already immersed, and the coldness produced by the water operated in combination with the spasms in my labouring chest to destroy vitality. The black fragment of the wreck rose with the waters, and raised obliquely the side of the bell, which may have been an additional cause for the rising of the sea within. Through my glazed eye I saw, lying in a hollow of the broken raft, a white figure—probably that seen by Vanderhoek when he fell into the sea. By and by, it became more visible as the waters rose, and I saw that it was the body of a female who had perished in the vessel. The image of the apparition has haunted me to this hour, and shall do till I die. A part of the dress which she had worn when she perished, still clung to her—about the half of the skirt of a silk gown that had been of some light colour, but had changed to a greenish hue. It was bound to the waist by a sash or belt of a darker shade. Her bosom was bare, and bore the same sickly hue of pale green; her face was placid; the eyes were open; but one of the balls had been extracted by some reptile of the deep; her long hair flowed among the weeds; and, hanging from the lobe of the left ear, I saw a clear gem that shone with the brightness of the stone called aqua marina. One of the arms had been taken off a little above the elbow; the flesh at the end of the stump appeared bloodless, and bleached to the colour of the skin; and limpets and other kinds of small shell-fish lay on or adhered to the cuticle. My feelings recoil from the recollections of the horrors of that apparition; and I fear I may incur the charge of endeavouring to produce an effect by the vulgar mode of harassing the mind with a minute description, too easily effected, of what, for the sake of humanity, should be concealed.

There the body lay in all its green horror. It was rising gradually to my side, within the bell, through the gloom of which the pale skin and light robes sent a sickly gleam. I had no power to move myself away from it. My body was bent so that my face was within a few inches of it; and a slight undulation of the waters that were rising into the bell inch by inch, imparted to the corpse a motion that made it dodge upwards and downwards, as if it made efforts to touch my countenance. All was as silent as death; for the slight agitation of the sea produced no noise. I was gasping for breath; a short period would have put an end to my sufferings, had not the air tubes again begun to send forth slight hissing sounds, and a small portion of the food of the lungs came to afford me sufficient power to contemplate, with greater distinctness and increased agony, all the circumstances of my situation. I felt the small boon instinctively as a relief: my breast again opened; I was able to raise my head so as to be more beyond the touch of the floating corpse; and as I lifted it, my eye fell on the flask of spirits that hung within reach on the side of the bell. I now struggled to seize it, and succeeded; but it was with many painful efforts that I got a portion of the liquor poured into my mouth. The half-dead physical powers of my system were, by this application, stimulated into something like vitality, and I listened attentively, while my eye was still riveted on the corpse that lay at my side, to the sound of the tubes. A motion of the right limb of Vanderhoek attracted my attention, and raised a hope that, if the air still continued to be supplied, he would recover; I knew, too, that as the bell filled again with the atmospheric supply, the waters would recede. But all my hopes were again prostrated; the valve ceased; the entrance of the air was again stopped; I applied the flask hastily again to my lips before the spasms of suffocation came again upon me, but the power of the spirits seemed to have fled, having no more influence over my system than a draught of water.

Thus was I again precipitated into my former condition of weakness and helplessness—the choking symptoms of suffocation increased again in intensity, and I was under the necessity to lie down on the seat, with my head again on a level with the corpse of the female, that still kept moving and dodging by my side. I was now as powerless to push it away as I was before to remove myself from it. I felt it touch my skin. Its face was close to mine—the pale cold cheek rubbed upon my chin and lips. The glazed eye seemed fixed upon me, and the stump of the torn arm struck upon me as the body moved. A higher undulation sometimes threw her flowing hair over my eyes, where it lay till another movement of the corpse took it off. I would have shut the lids of the protruding orbs that stood fixed in my head, if I had had any power; but I could not—my whole face being swollen, and the muscles as rigid as if in death. I was thus compelled to receive the vision into my mind; and the touch seemed to cling to the decaying sensibilities, as if it formed a part of them. It is impossible that my sufferings could have lasted many minutes longer if the air tubes had been entirely closed; but, as if it had been determined by the stern fates that I should be suspended for a length of time between life and death, there were kept up, at almost regular intervals, two or three whizzing sounds of the entangled and obstructed apparatus—an indication that small supplies of air were at these moments thrown in upon me. It was only these sounds, the dodging of the pale-green corpse, the touches of its cold skin, the light of its glazed eye, the dark figures of my two companions, and the general gloom of the bell, relieved slightly by the greenish-hued yolks of glass, that I was sensible of perceiving. The internal workings of my mind seemed to have ceased. I had scarcely any consciousness of a conception—the whole cerebral functions concerned in thought and feeling being limited to undefined sensation, that had only some connection with the power of external perception.

Even this partial state of consciousness had died gradually away, for, during a short period, I was totally beyond the reach of the power of any external object. There is a blank in my recollection of these touches and visions, which, though scarcely at the time coming within the province of mind, have since been the most vivid perceptions ever treasured up in my memory. Yet that period of all but total death was no relief to me. The dim hazy vision of all around me dawned again, like the shadowy renovations of a fearful dream that has sunk in sleep, and risen again as the troubled fancy regained a portion of its activity. These indistinct shadows of consciousness, as they came in the wake of the physical power that felt the quickening influence of another draft of air, carried more insufferable sensations in their dark forms than had accompanied my more distinct perceptions. They were mere filmy traces, broken and unconnected—exhibiting to me sometimes only the darkness of the bell, sometimes the mere face; occasionally limited to the eye alone, the stump of the arm alone, the ear-ring alone; sometimes merely the two stretched-out forms of the men; sometimes the green deep and the tangled sea-weed. Then the array of all the things around me would suddenly flash upon me with a unity and a vividness that produced one gleam of almost entire consciousness—in another moment extinguished—and succeeded by another period of all but death—to be again followed by a succession of the broken fragments of vision, when the living powers were in a slight degree revived. I leave it to physiologists and psychologists to account for these sudden exertions of the reluming powers of the mind in the very lowest state of the dying faculties. We see something of the same kind in the physical economy—moments of strength in the most exhausted weakness—bright glows of the taper of life in the socket of death—a collected unity of power in moments of dissolution, as if the spirit made a last struggle to assert its lost authority over the great archangel. I can speak at least to their effects—a wretched boon of nature to miserable man, where he can say no more than that he feels—that the boasted energies of the soul seem to be all rolled up in one sensation of undescribable pain.

I was awakened from this state of stupor by a loud clanking of chains upon the top of the bell; and I heard the sound at the very moment when I felt myself drawing a long breath. I had been unconscious of the working of the air-pump, which must have been going on for some time, though I cannot tell how long. The bell was replenished. I breathed again freely, and became sensible. I looked round me, and saw all things in the same position as formerly. The corpse was still by my side, and my newly awakened horror made me struggle to rise. I succeeded so far as to lean upon my arm, whereby I removed myself some space from the dead body. The rattling of the chains still continued, and I had the power of thinking so far, as to conjecture that efforts were being made to draw up the bell. But new incidents were now in progress. The air had revived Vanderhoek. I saw him stretching out his arms, as if to relieve his chest, which was heaving violently. He drew long inspirations, and struggled to turn himself on the seat. He succeeded, and I saw his face, which was dreadfully swollen, and of a dark livid colour. His eyes were wide open, and the light of life and returning vision seemed to be illumining them. The first perception he was conscious of was the vision of the corpse. His eye-balls turned, fixed upon it, and recoiled from it; and strange guttural sounds, with half-articulated words—"Shrecklich—shrecken!"—were wrung from him. He looked wildly around him, shuddered, and grasped convulsively the bench. Meanwhile, the rattling of the chains on the bell continued, and a sudden jerk almost precipitated me into the sea. The bell had clearly moved; the next moment it shook violently, from another effort to raise it; it appeared to me to revolve; another sudden jerk followed; it rose perceptibly; the water rushed in to fill up the void; the corpse of the woman whirled round in the eddy; and I saw Jenkins' body fall from the bench into the sea, and disappear.

Vanderhoek, who had now recovered his consciousness, uttered a loud cry as he saw his companion sink. The continued fresh air seemed to strengthen him far more rapidly than it did me, and I perceived that he now made violent struggles to lay hold of the mattock. He succeeded beyond my expectation; despair nerved his arm; he clutched the instrument, and rung three successive clangs on the side of the bell. These were probably unnecessary, as it was manifest now that those on the lighter were doing everything in their power to rescue us from our perilous situation. The chains still clanked, and we had ascended perceptibly, though how far I had no means of ascertaining. There was another stoppage, the German sat with the instrument still in his hand, and his eye fixed on the body of the woman, which, from the continued whirling of the water, span round and round, as if it had been placed upon a pivot. After looking thus for a few moments, he started suddenly, then reaching up his hand, seized wildly another flask that hung near him, drained it to the bottom, and flung away the empty vessel. Some time passed before I felt any further motion upwards; and the large quantity of strong liquor that Vanderhoek had thrown into his still weak body, operated upon him with a quickness that surprised me. He began to get furious, talked incoherently, swung the iron mattock backwards and forwards, and sung stanzas of the "Zechlied." This was a new source of terror to me. He looked wildly at me as if he did not know who I was; swore the oaths of his country, in which the words "teufel, donner, blitzen," rang pre-eminently; used threats against me, as the cause of all that had occurred to him and his companion. Then he looked at the corpse, and, in a paroxysm of madness, struck the mattock into its white bosom, accompanying his action with wild oaths. I expected every moment that the next stroke would be on my own head, and sat in readiness to seize the weapon, and, if possible, debilitated as I was, to wrench it from his hands. My efforts to calm and pacify him were unavailing. I pointed to the side of the bell, and, in broken accents, for I could yet scarcely speak, told him to ring again; but he did not seem to understand; giving me wild looks, showering broken oaths upon me, and holding up the mattock in a threatening attitude, as if he would cleave my head in twain.

During all this painful period the air was regularly supplied; but the efforts of those on the lighter had not been able to raise us further. In the midst of Vanderhoek's ravings, I thought I heard a sound above, unlike that of the apparatus by which the bell was wrought. It was a creaking, crashing sound, as if the bell were forcing up some heavy piece of wood with which it was encumbered. The thought struck me instantly that the cause of all our misfortunes lay in the drifting of some large piece of the wreck over the top of the bell, which had got entangled with the air-tubes and chain, and defied all the efforts of the workmen to raise us. The creaking sound continued, and, mixing with the whizzing of the air-tubes, the grating of the chain, and the roarings and yells of Vanderhoek, made the scene more dismal than it had yet been. I was in danger of my life—but momentarily redeemed, as it were, from the precincts of eternity—every minute, from the fierceness of the raving being beside me; and I could scarcely hope that all those protracted efforts of the workmen would ever raise us from the immense depth at which we were thus fixed by some great cause. I looked in the placid face of the corpse, and wished that I were as far removed as her spirit was from these complicated evils of the lower deep, and the scarcely less remediable ills of the upper world. But I was soon roused from my dark reverie: a louder crash than I had yet heard sounded over the bell, and produced such an effect upon the excited mind of Vanderhoek, that he roused his body suddenly, and struck a fierce blow at me with the iron instrument he still held in his hand. He had over-calculated his partially-recovered strength, and tumbled into the sea alongside of the corpse. I hesitated whether I should aid him in getting up. I saw him struggling and clinging by the garments of the body, which he tore—so tender was the material—into shreds. As his hold gave way, he clutched the body itself, which, sinking with his weight, disappeared, leaving him to clamber for support round the lower part of the benches. I could not see him drown, though I shuddered at the danger which awaited me when he might recover his position. At that very moment I distinctly felt the bell ascending; and a fierce whirling and boiling of the waters rushing into the void, would in an instant have sucked him down to rise no more, if I had not seized him by the bushy hair of the head. In that position I held him as firmly as my impaired strength would permit. The bell still ascended, and the buoying power of the water kept him swimming, and made him obey my slightest impulse. The submersion and the contact into which he had come with the corpse had manifestly removed the effects of the liquor, and his imploring eye was eloquent in its appeal to me to continue my grasp. This I did while the bell continued to ascend; the light began to increase in the yolks of glass; and the voices of the men in the lighter greeted my ear. In a moment afterwards, I saw the light of the sun shining red through the windows; in another moment the circle of bright effulgence between the bell and the sea met my enraptured eye. A loud cry of terror came from the workmen as they saw the body of Vanderhoek swimming in the sea. They ceased their process of raising; and swinging the bell to a side, some one got hold of the German, and I let go the grasp of his hair. Two or three more turns of the crane brought the bell on a level with the lighter. I sprung down upon the deck, and fell back in a swoon.

When I recovered, I saw several people standing round me, among whom there was an individual who claimed, for a time, my undivided gaze. He was a tall, handsome individual, dressed in deep mournings. He had a white pocket handkerchief in his hands, which he applied frequently to his eyes; and he looked at me anxiously as he saw me recovering from the effects of the syncope into which I had fallen. He was proceeding to put some questions to me, when Mr. W—— interfered, and stated that I ought to be allowed time to collect my energies before my mind was led again into the subject of what I had suffered during the time we were in the deep. I was, accordingly, assisted on shore; and, having been put to bed, slept for several hours so soundly that I do not think a single image of what I had seen and heard during that dismal scene occurred to my fancy; but, when in the act of wakening, a confused influx of ideas, all derived from the source of my sufferings, rushed into my mind, and for a few minutes I conceived that I was still in the bell, that I heard the sound of the air tubes, saw Jenkins fall, the corpse lying beside me, Vanderhoek hanging by my grasp of his hair, and all the minutiæ of horrors that then encompassed me; a commotion which comes over me often yet, like a species of monomania, when I will start up, and cling to the bedposts, and scream for terror. It being known that I was awake, Mr. W—— and the stranger came to me. It was their object to get an account of all that had occurred during my descent. I gave it as nearly as I could recollect, and, when I came to describe the appearance and figure of the corpse of the female, I saw the stranger change colour, his frame trembled, his lips turned pale, and he rose and walked through the room as if afraid to listen to my narrative.

"What means this?" said I to Mr. W——, in a low tone.

"The female whose body you saw in the bell," he replied, "was the wife of Mr. G——. He stands before you.

He was saved from the wreck, and she perished."

"Good God! and I have already given a part of the shocking detail," I responded.

The stranger heard me, as he paced the room, returned, and sat down by my bedside.

"I am not satisfied that it was my Agnes," he exclaimed, in broken accents, while the tears flowed over his cheeks. "There was a waiting-maid along with us—describe her more particularly. I can listen."

As he uttered these words, I could perceive that he contracted his nerves, his hands were clenched, and over his frame there passed a shiver that seemed to mock the resolution to confirm the mind by a mere physical action. I proceeded to give a fuller account of her dress and ear-ring, the character of her face and figure, so far as I could discover them. Every word seemed to enter his very soul. He turned round again. There was something he wished to say, but he hesitated, trembled, and stammered.

"Was that fair form mutilated?" he asked, at length, "O God! I picture my Agnes torn by monsters of the deep, and hideous urchins resting on her bosom. Yet, why do I ask knowledge that must sit for ever on my heart, and engender visions that in the hours of night must torture my soul, to the end of my pilgrimage in this dark world?"

I hesitated to say more; the orbless socket—the torn stump of the arm—the limpets that clung to her skin—the bosom pierced by Vanderhoek's mattock, were all before me, and shook my soul. But why should I have added an artificial misery to wretchedness like his? I would not dwell on the subject. The stranger imputed my disinclination to satisfy his morbid desire for information to its true cause. A paroxysm of sorrow seized him. He rose suddenly, took his hat, and, covering his pallid face with his handkerchief, rushed out of the room. How often have I thought of that individual! I never saw him again; but his image is for ever associated with the vision of that corpse, shining in the sickly green hue of the medium in which it lay. The body was never found; he never saw it. And was it not well for him? What would have been his agony, to have seen the beloved of his bosom as I saw her, to have treasured up in his mind the lineaments of that face, the harrowing minutiæ of her mutilated form?

I got an account from Mr. W—— of what took place on board of the lighter while the bell was down. It was a long time, he said, before anything was suspected to be wrong, as the men often remain down for an hour without a single signal coming from them. The difficulty of working the air-pumps first roused their suspicions; and when they found that the bell would not respond to the action of the crane, they knew at once that it had got fixed among some part of the wreck. I need not detail their efforts to relieve us; they are possessed of no interest; the result is known; but who shall know, as I experienced, the horrors of that period?

My patient, when he had finished his narrative, put his hand over his eyes, and shuddered. I could do little for an individual thus situated; but I visited him often, more with a view to the benefit of science, than from any hope of rescuing him from the dominion of the power he had, like Frankenstein, created, to satisfy a diseased craving of the mind, and trembled at after it was formed, as he found himself helpless and weak in his energies to exorcise it. The continued brooding of his sick fancy over all the strange forms he had seen, produced, in a still greater degree, a weakness of the mind itself, that is, a weakness as regards the sane condition of the mind; for his imagination, drawing a morbid pabulum from his disease, grew stronger and stronger in its capacity to invest the images he gloated over with more fearful characteristics, till often, as I was informed, he started up in the middle of the night and screamed out that he was in the present act of suffering again all he had already experienced. But what struck me as still more remarkable in this victim, was, that any change that took place upon him for the better, in respect of his physical economy, was, while accompanied by a partial release from the domination of his old fancies, generally attended by a kind of new-born desire for another and a new supply of his stimulant visions. This discovery I made one day, when, as I felicitated myself on having effected a confirmation of his nerves, by the application of a course of tonics, I told him that I myself was on the eve of encountering all the unpleasant feelings attendant upon the performance of a painful operation on a very beautiful patient, whose life might too likely fall a sacrifice to her desire to get quit of a mortal disease. His eye brightened, he held out his hands, and supplicated me to allow him to be present, under the assumed character of a surgeon. My refusal produced disappointment and chagrin; and he often afterwards harped on the cruelty of my resolution to discomfit him. He afterwards went to another part of the country to reside with his relations; and the last notice I had of him was, that he was seen bending his skeleton body over the blackened corpses of several individuals who had been burnt to death in the conflagration of a large dwelling-house in the town where he resided.