But his coadjutors were inexperienced, and perhaps his own courage was of that saccharine character that gets oozy and slushy in moist perils.  When descending with his leaded boots on the dark green outline of sea mosses that in the clear Gulf invested the vessel in a verdurous coat, by some mistake he was let down with a slip, and went hurtling through the rotten planks, losing his holy water and sending his witch’s wand—­well, to its original owner.  He crushed through, and the infinite dust of infusoriae and diatomaceae choked his vision.  The Teredo navalis, whose labors are so destructive in southern seas, had perforated the old hulk, and converted the vessel into a spongy mass of wood, clay and lime.  Innumerable algae and curious fungi of the sea, hydroids, delicate-frost formed emerald plumuluria and campanuluna, bryozoa, mollusks, barnacles and varieties of coral had used it as a builder’s quarry and granary.  As the geologist finds atom by atom of an organism converted into a stony counterfeit, these busy existences had preserved the vessel’s shape, but converted the woody fibre to their own uses.  He could see nothing at first but a mixture of green and ochreous dust, through which tiny electric fires went quivering and shaking.  In the confusion he lost the signal line, and had no way of making his condition known.  Plunging about as the sea dust began to settle, and already more intent on finding the life-line and getting out of that than of securing Lafitte’s gold, he observed some spectators not pleasant to look upon.  A lobster or a crab is much pleasanter upon the table than in the sea, and there were other things he knew, and some he believed, might not take his hasty visit pleasantly.  There was the horseshoe-fish with ugly strings hanging from his base, disagreeable arachnides, strange star fish and their parasites, and, curiously, a large wolfish fish that had built a nest and was watching it and him—­watching him with no agreeable or timid expression in its angry eyes.  He was just expecting Victor Hugo’s devil fish to complete his horror when a sudden, sharp, bone-breaking shock struck him from an electrical eel or marine torpedo.  This was a real and sensible danger, and as he struggled to ascend the hulk to the rotten half-deck, the spongy substance gave way, the treacherous quicksand, with its smooth, tenacious throat-clutch, slid down and caught him.  The danger was real and imminent, when his companions above, observing the slide, drew him up.  And that, I believe, was the first and last attempt to levv on Lafitte’s gold.

But the experience of Pharaoh and the danger of our rambling wrecker are not the only instances of the wall of waters or the destruction it causes.  Nine days after a storm in the Gulf, a traveler, finding his way from the salt-pans of Western Louisiana, took a little fishing-craft.  There was that fresh purity in the air and the sea which follows the bursting of the elements.  The numerous “bays”