XVIII. The Guardians of the St. Lawrence

XIX. The Island of Demons

XX. Bimini and the Fountain of Youth

_Notes_




I

THE STORY OF ATLANTIS


The Greek sage Socrates, when he was but a boy minding his father's
goats, used to lie on the grass under the myrtle trees; and, while the
goats grazed around him, he loved to read over and over the story which
Solon, the law-giver and poet, wrote down for the great-grandfather of
Socrates, and which Solon had always meant to make into a poem, though he
died without doing it. But this was briefly what he wrote in prose:--

"I, Solon, was never in my life so surprised as when I went to Egypt for
instruction in my youth, and there, in the temple of Sais, saw an aged
priest who told me of the island of Atlantis, which was sunk in the sea
thousands of years ago. He said that in the division of the earth the gods
agreed that the god Poseidon, or Neptune, should have, as his share, this
great island which then lay in the ocean west of the Mediterranean Sea,
and was larger than all Asia. There was a mortal maiden there whom