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and disappears,'--and then I was disappointed to find that the wreck of
a Dutch merchant ship overtook it and went down before. At length, after
making several guesses of this nature, and being deceived in all--this
fact--the fact of my invariable miscalculation--set me upon a train of
reflection that made my limbs again tremble, and my heart beat heavily
once more.
"It was not a new terror that thus affected me, but the dawn of a more
exciting hope. This hope arose partly from memory, and partly from
present observation. I called to mind the great variety of buoyant
matter that strewed the coast of Lofoden, having been absorbed and
then thrown forth by the Moskoe-ström. By far the greater number of the
articles were shattered in the most extraordinary way--so chafed
and roughened as to have the appearance of being stuck full of
splinters--but then I distinctly recollected that there were some of
them which were not disfigured at all. Now I could not account for this
difference except by supposing that the roughened fragments were the
only ones which had been completely absorbed--that the others had
entered the whirl at so late a period of the tide, or, for some reason,
had descended so slowly after entering, that they did not reach the
bottom before the turn of the flood came, or of the ebb, as the case
might be. I conceived it possible, in either instance, that they might
thus be whirled up again to the level of the ocean, without undergoing
the fate of those which had been drawn in more early, or absorbed more
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