I had some trouble in understanding.  The most that I made of it was that he, and he alone, knew the whereabouts of a city buried ages since under the sea and filled with treasure of an unbelievable description.  But you may imagine that even the hint of such a thing was enough to set me all athrill, and I was not greatly surprised at myself when I found that I was following the queer, slinking figure down our bare little New England street.

He led me to a ship, an old brigantine heavy with age and barnacles and hung about with the sorriest gray rags of canvas that ever did duty for sails.  No wonder that nine days out we lost our fore tops’l.  But stay; I fear I go too fast!  For you must know that I went aboard that brigantine, and once aboard I could not go ashore again, partly because the strange, ill-assorted crew detained me at every turn, and partly because the longing was so strong upon me to see the things I had read of so often.  And that night found me still upon the vessel, nosing down to the harbor light, with the lamps of my father’s house winking less and less brightly on the dim shore astern.

Well, sirs, it would weary you to tell much of that voyage, and besides, many’s the time you yourselves must have weathered the Horn.  For it was ’round Cape Stiff we went—­no Panama Canal in those days—­and I served a bitter apprenticeship on ice-coated yards, clutching numbly at battering sails frozen stiff as iron.  It was Peru we were bound for,—­Peru where the submarine city lay beneath uncounted fathoms waiting for us.  The captain and I were the only ones Acuma, the half-breed, had taken into his confidence; all the others sailed on a blind errand, trusting to the skipper, who was a shrewd man and severe.  And the brigantine wallowed around the Cape and toiled on and on up the coast, and every day Acuma grew more restless; every day he cast about the water with eyes that seemed to pierce to the very bottom of the Pacific.

One day of blue sky and little breeze, when we were pushing the brigantine with all sails set, Acuma flung himself at a bound to the quarterdeck, and a moment later the skipper shouted quick orders that the crew could not understand for the life of them.  For to heave the ship to, just when we all had been whistling for enough breeze to give her something more than steerage way, seemed nothing short of insane.  Acuma climbed to the maintop and looked at the coast of Peru with a telescope, and the captain took bearings with his instruments.

It was Acuma and I who went over the side in diving suits, for no others save the captain knew what we sought, as I have said.  Down I went and down, with the weight of water crushing ever more strongly against me, till I stood upon the sea’s floor.  That in itself was quite wonderful enough—­the green whiteness of the sand and the strange, multi-colored forest of weed and coral through which my searchlight