John Gaythers Garden and the Stories Told Therein | Page 3

instead of birds flying about among
their branches there were little fishes of every color: canary-colored
fishes, fishes like robin-redbreasts, and others which you might have
thought were blue jays if they had been up in the air instead of down in
the water."
"Where did you say all this is to be seen?" asked the Daughter of the
House, who loved all lovely things.
"Oh, in a good many places in warm climates," said John. "But, now I
come to think of it, there was one place where I saw more beautiful
sights, more grand and wonderful sights, under the water than I believe
anybody ever saw before! Would you like me to tell you about it?"
"Indeed--I--would!" said she, taking off her hat.
John now began to sharpen the end of his pea-stick. "It was a good
many years ago," said he, "more than twenty--and I was then a
seafaring man. I was on board a brig, cruising in the West Indies, and

we were off Porto Rico, about twenty miles northward, I should say,
when we ran into something in the night,--we never could find out what
it was,--and we stove a big hole in that brig which soon began to let in
a good deal more water than we could pump out. The captain he was a
man that knew all about that part of the world, and he told us all that
we must work as hard as we could at the pumps, and if we could keep
her afloat until he could run her ashore on a little sandy island he knew
of not far from St. Thomas, we might be saved. There was a fresh
breeze from the west, and he thought he could make the island before
we sank.
"I was mighty glad to hear him say this, for I had always been nervous
when I was cruising off Porto Rico. Do you know, miss, that those
waters are the very deepest in the whole world?"
"No," said she; "I never heard that."
"Well, they are," said John. "If you should take the very tallest
mountain there is in any part of the earth and put it down north of Porto
Rico, so that the bottom of it shall rest on the bottom of the sea, the top
of that mountain would be sunk clean out of sight, so that ships could
sail over it just as safely as they sail in any part of the ocean.
"Of course a man would drown just as easily in a couple of fathoms of
water as in this deep place; but it is perfectly horrible to think of
sinking down, down, down into the very deepest water-hole on the face
of the whole earth."
"Didn't you have any boats?" asked the young lady.
"We hadn't any," said John. "We had sold all of them about two months
before to a British merchantman who had lost her boats in a cyclone.
One of the things our captain wanted to get to St. Thomas for was to
buy some more boats. He heard he could get some cheap ones there.
"Well, we pumped and sailed as well as we could, but we hadn't got
anywhere near that sandy island the captain was making for, when, one
morning after breakfast, our brig, which was pretty low in the water by

this time, gave a little hitch and a grind, and stuck fast on something;
and if we hadn't been lively in taking in all sail there would have been
trouble. But the weather was fine, and the sea was smooth, and when
we had time to think about what had happened we were resting on the
surface of the sea, just as quiet and tranquil as if we had been a toy ship
in a shop-window.
"What we had stuck on was a puzzle indeed! As I said before, our
captain knew all about that part of the sea, and, although he knew we
were in shallow soundings, he was certain that there wasn't any shoal or
rock thereabout that we could get stuck on.
"We sounded all around the brig, and found lots of water at the stern,
but not so much forward. We were stuck fast on something, but nobody
could imagine what it was. However, we were not sinking any deeper,
and that was a comfort; and the captain he believed that if we had had
boats we could row to St. Thomas; but we didn't have any boats, so we
had to make the best of it. He put up a flag of distress, and waited till
some craft should come along and take us off.
"The captain and the crew didn't seem to be much troubled about what
had happened, for so long as