OR, VULCAN S PEAK. 163 some quite near the Reef, as we shall still continue to call the island of the crater. Island, however, it could now nardly be termed. It is true that ribands of water ap proached it on all sides, resembling creeks, and rivers and small sounds; but, as Mark stood there on the Summit, it seemed to him that it was now possible to walk for leagues, in every direction, commencing at the crater and following the lines of reefs, and rocks, and sands, that had been laid bare by the late upheaving. The extent of this change gave him confidence in its permanency, and the young man had hopes that what had thus been produced by the Provi dence of God would be permitted to remain, to answer his own benevolent purposes. It certainly made an immense difference in his own situation. The boat could still be used, but it was now possible for him to ramble for hours, if not for days, along the necks, and banks, and hummocks, and swales that had been formed, and that with a dry foot. His limits were so much enlarged as to offer something like a new world to his enterprise and curiosity. The crater, nevertheless, was apparently about the centre of this new creation. To the south, it is true, the eye could not penetrate more than two or three leagues. A vast, dun-looking cloud, still covered the sea in that direc tion, veiling its surface far and wide, and mingling with the vapours of the upper atmosphere. Somewhere within this cloud, how far or how near from him he knew not, Mark made no doubt a new outlet to the pent forces of the inner earth was to be found, forming another and an active crater for the exit of the fires beneath. Geology was a science that had not made its present progress in the day of Mark Woolston, but his education had been too good to leave him totally without a theory for what had happened. He supposed that the internal fires had produced so mucb gas, just beneath this spot, as to open crevices at the bot tom of the ocean, through which water had flowed in suffi cient quantities to create a vast body of steam, which steam had been the immediate agent of lifting so much of the rock and land, and of causing the earthquake. At the fame time, the internal fires had acted in concert; and following an opening, they had got so near the surface as o force a chimney for their own exit, in the form of this
