Then, said I, this can be nothing else than the "great, all-whelming whirlpool of the Maelström!"
FASHIONABLE.
"How do you like me in this, Vera? Tell me the Truth."
"Well, dear, it looks as if your pet Poodle had Died, and you'd had him made up as a Cloak!"
In all violent eddies at sea there is good fishing, at proper opportunities, if only one has the courage to attempt it. In fact, it is made a matter of desperate speculation—risk standing instead of labour, and courage, of a reckless, and not too scrupulous sort, answering for capital. But there are many who would lightly adventure the pestilential perils of a tropic stream, or fever-haunted water-way or canal, who would yet shrink from being caught—owing to want of care, and cautious calculation as to the exact hours of slack and safety—by the hideous, irresistible, all-engulfing, all-wrecking whirl of the terrifying Ström! Once drawn within the down-draught of that hideous vortex, a whole army might be destroyed more certainly than even by the manifold death-dealing contrivances of modern science, a whole legislature lost in a single hour of ghastly and unhonoured catastrophe!
Oh, the sickening sweep of that descent! With what sensations of awe, horror, and strange, distraught admiration, must a doomed victim, once within that whirl, gaze about him!—for he has leisure to observe. The downward draught of those swift, wide-sweeping, spirally-whirling water-walls is comparatively slow. The victim clinging to his boat, or bound to his spar or barrel, appears to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel, vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose perfectly smooth sides might be mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spin around, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shoot forth, a foul, phosphorescent iridescence, as of accumulated corruption, streaming in a flood of loathsome radiance along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost mist—veiled recesses of the abyss!