McLeod ran his fingers through his hair again and horror was written in scarehead letters on his face.

"Come, come; you're all right now." Dan tried to calm him. "Drink your beer. Now go on. How deep was it?"

"Not too deep, for the sunlight was shimmering and shivering over the bones o' the ship, according as the waves was rippling and curling on top o' the water. It wasn't too deep, and there was a lot o' little fishes kept looking, and then they'd scamper away all of a sudden when they was frighted, like a lot o' minnows. But down in the ship it was dark and there was strange creatures there."

The diver shuddered and beads of sweat stood out on his furrowed forehead.

"Drink some more beer," Dan urged. The former intense bewilderment again furrowed McLeod's face as if something he was seeking kept hiding just beyond reach of his memory. He drank the beer and wiped the foam from his lips and chin on his sleeve.

"How did the octopus get hold of you? Tell me all about your fight with it. Nobody knows anything about it except what you told them through your diver's telephone while you were slicing the beast's arms off," Dan explained.

"Got hold on me? Oh, ay, it got hold on me all right," answered McLeod. "It must have got me from behind, because I didn't see it till it was around my neck. Long arms, like snakes, and it gets hold on me with two of 'em at once. First thing I knows about it, it draws me to one side, and I try to get away, but my feet are weighted and I can't move fast enough. But I'm just as cool as a clam. 'Never lose your head now or you'll never see Seattle again,' I says to myself. But it's hard to saw through those slippery, tough arms with my knife, though they look so soft and easy when the thing's captured and lying on shore, dead. But I've lost my knife," he moaned. "I tell you it's gone, and I can't pick it up."

The intent, bewildered look had again given place to horror.

"Come, come," Dan soothed him, "what ails you? Here, let me pour you some

more beer. You say you had a knife?"

"I tell you I dropped it," exclaimed the diver with growing excitement. "Pick it up! Quick, I tell you!"

Pressing one knee against the table as if he were still struggling in the tight grip of the eight-armed monster, the diver gave a sudden push, upsetting the beer onto Dan, and sending his own chair backward onto the floor. He struggled to his feet with a frightened oath. As Dan sprang to help him, the diver seized his arms, pinning them to his sides and stared hard into his face, panting and shrieked

"Where's that knife? I dropped it, I tell you!"

Dan struggled to free himself, but the diver with wild, livid, staring eyeballs, held him fast. The sweat poured from the old man's face. Dan was thoroughly frightened and was about to call loudly for help when McLeod relaxed his hold and sank to the floor, moaning as if in agony.

Dan lifted him up and helped him to a chair. McLeod was as weak as a kitten. He stared helplessly around the room, while the sweat ran down his face in tiny rivulets. Boisterous laughter from the barroom explained why nobody had heard the struggle.

"Come, now," urged Dan. "You had a knife, you tell me, and you lost it. How did the air-hose break?"

"I cut it," McLeod answered, very slowly. "I didn't mean to, but the beast drew me towards him, and kept shooting a black, inky stuff at me, so by and by I couldn't see him for the dark clouds of it in the water. I sawed through three of its ugly hands, and I'll get away all right, only it's got me by the arm, and I've cut into the air-tube over my head, and I've dropped my knife and I can't pick it up.

"Where is that knife, lad?" he whined. "There's no time to lose, for I've got no air, I tell you! They're pulling on the ropes up there, can't you feel 'em? Give me that knife! I've got to cut loose, I tell you! They're trying to pull me up, and the air-tube's cut, and I can't breathe, and I've got to cut away! Don't you hear me?"

He covered his face with his hands, moaning piteously.

"It's no use! It's no use!" he whimpered. "I've lost the knife."

His unkempt, coarse white hair was wet with perspiration. Understanding began to dawn on Dan.

"Come, now," Dan said at last. "Nobody's going to hurt you. You're all right now. Tell me, how did you get to the surface?"

McLeod took his hands from his face and stared at Dan blankly.

"How did they get you up? How did you get to the top?" Dan repeated. "Get to the top?" the diver moaned. "I didn't."

He covered his face again with his hands.

Dan felt a strange sinking of the stomach as he looked at the moaning creature before him, who was still fighting hopelessly on in his mind, with blank horror always at the end of his tale. For the diver's mind had given way under the strain of the desperate struggle under the waves and recorded no memories beyond that terrific combat, nor gave any glimmer of hope as to the out

come.

Dan had his story. And that same day tender hands took McLeod into their care and ministered to his overwrought nerves and anguished brain.

F

ORGOTTEN and unknown by his

torians of California letters, "Eulalie," pseudonym of Mary Eulalie (Fee) Shannon, seems to have been a California woman author, first to have had a volume of her poems published. At the request of Librarian Joseph Rowell of the University of California, I make a bibliographical note of this priority for permanent preservation in the Overland Monthly. If her verse had little merit, its existence is at least a literary curiosity.

In looking over last spring some of my historical notes and collections, made some years ago upon the mining section of the Sierras in the '50s, I found a reference to the Placer Herald of March 18, 1854, containing the statement John Shannon, Jr., had on January 31, 1854, at New Richmond, Ohio, married Mary E. Fee, "who had contributed many graceful poems to Western periodicals over the nom de plume of 'Eulalie,'" and that Shannon planned to return to California. A citation to the Auburn Whig of December 30, 1854, noted her brief

obituary, with nothing on her antecedents. A Placer county history without detail barely speaks of her poetry, but not her book.

There is no mention of her in the literary histories of California, by the official literary historian of the State, nor in other histories of California literature nor Pacific coast anthologies. Librari

ans, booksellers and collectors of Californiana told me they had never heard of her residence in California. The California State Library, which has not listed her in its printed names of California authors, referred me to "Literary Women of California Who Have Passed Away," an article in the Sacramento Wednesday Press of March 11, 1903. This was written by Winfield J. Davis, the Sacramento historian and native of the county of "Eulalie's" residence in California. contains a repetition of her obituary from the Auburn Whig, and the assertion "of her there is very little available."

It

A hurried and incomplete examination of Eastern publications reveals she was not unknown and forgotten in the East.

William Cushing's "Initials and Pseudonyms" has the following: "Shannon, Mrs. Mary Eulalie (Fee), 1824-55 [sic]. Eulalie. An American poet, of Auburn, Cal." Joseph Sabin's "Dictionary of Books Relating to America From Its Discovery to the Present Time" lists her volume of poems under her married ame and gives her pseudonym.

I used antiquarian methods in searching old files and following clues, and located, after much correspondence, her nephew, Dr. Frank Fee, a physician of Cincinnati, Ohio, to whom I am indebted for data on her early life.

Mary Eulalie Fee was born in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, February 9, 1824, daughter of William Robert Fee, a native of Scott county, Kentucky, born in the pioneer days of 1793. She was thus one of the first few women poets of Southern birth, although I do not find her in Lucian Lamar Knight's valuable biographical dictionary of Southern literary people in the "Library of Southern Literature." Her mother, Elizabeth Dutten Carver, born at Castleton, Rutland county, Vermont, in 1795, was the seventh generation from John Carver, first Governor of Plymouth. The mother and her parents crossed the Alleghenies in covered wagons and settled at Marietta, Ohio, in 1812, where, at seventeen, she became a school teacher, and is said to have been a "great student of history, Shakespeare and the Bible."

Miss Fee was educated by the best private tutors in Cincinnati. Among her intimates there were Tosso, perhaps the greatest violinist of the Middle West of the period; Alice and Phoebe Cary, and Henry Warrels, a great guitarist. Her home was at "Dove Cottage," built by her father at New Richmond, Ohio.

Her husband, John Shannon, Jr., a California editor of the early '50s, was afterward one of the publishers of the Calaveras Chronicle. He established the Visalia Delta, a Democratic paper, in an intensely Southern settlement. As the result of a bitter newspaper controversy with William Gouverneur Morris-whose name suggests a connection with a talented family-editor of a Republican publication of that locality, he was shot

to death by Morris in 1860 in a violent rencounter. Shannon returned to the East in 1853 and married Miss Fee on January 31, 1854, going immediately to California, where I have a record of her residence as early as April 10, 1854.

Her volume of poems, "Buds, Blossoms and Leaves," a well-printed book of vii, 194 pages, 4% x7 inches, has this title page: "Buds, Blossoms and Leaves:|| Poems,|| By Eulalie. Cincinnati.j

Moore, Wilstach & Keys.|| MDCCCLIV." If there were no other evidence, its preface, dated June, 1854, indicates she was a resident of California when the book left the press.

None of the poems show a California influence, and all were probably written before her departure. One is entitled "To Frank-In California." "Lines" was "suggested by the death of James D. Turner, who died in Nevada City, California, August 4th, 1851," according to a note. "The Desert Burial" resulted from the receipt of a letter on the death on the desert of an immigrant to California. The poems must have had a considerable circulation in this State, because to this day they are often found there in second-hand book shops.

Depending upon the definition of the term, it may be declared she was hardly a California poet. She calls herself "a Californian" in her correspondence with Eastern newspapers.

From a scrapbook of her newspaper writings, I find she contributed a series, "Travel Scenes," written for the Daily Times of Cincinnati, after her arrival in California, beginning in April, 1854, and extending to December, 1854, the last date a few weeks before her death. In this scrapbook there are nine columns by her, "Leaves From the Diary of a Californian," cut from the Dollar Times. There is also a story, "Frank Waterford, a Tale of the Mines," written for the Placer Democrat, published at Auburn by her husband. Following is a threecolumn story, "A Lost Waif, Mining, in California," dated Auburn, October, 1854, written for the Dollar Times. All this is among the first California story writing.

In this scrapbook there is an announce

ment from the Daily Democratic State Journal, once published in Sacramento by the father of Joseph D. Redding, of a lecture by her on "Home," delivered at McNulty's Music Hall.

Her California home was at The Junction House, in the Sierras, a stage station two miles from Auburn, where branched in the '50s the stage line from Sacramento to Dutch Flat and Yankee Jim's, one of the largest and liveliest mining camps in California. The retiring and idealistic poet, I learn from a pioneer, was the object of pride, love and interest by hundreds of young mining adventurers who daily passed the station, and her fame became wide in the mines.

Dying in December, 1854, her obituary in the Auburn Whig says, "she was generally known in this State as 'Eulalie.'" Her tombstone in an abandoned cemetery in Auburn had nothing inscribed on it but the word, "Eulalie." Ambrose Bierce makes this graveyard one of the scenes of his story, "The Realm of the Unreal," and says the delapidated burial ground was "a dishonor to the living, a calumny on the dead, a blasphemy against God." It was removed a few years ago, and it seems no one knows what became of "Eulalie's" remains.

The earliest book of poems published

in California in the collection of the California State Library is "Idealina and Other Poems," by E. J. C. Kewen, printed in San Francisco in 1853. Colonel Kewen was a Mississippian, Attorney-General of California, 1849-50; editor, orator, State legislator and financial agent and aide of Walker in Nicaragua.

William Henry Rhodes, later a Californian, had published in New York in 1846 a book of poems entitled "Indian Gallows and Other Poems." Probably there were other books of verse published in the East at an early date by those who were to become Californians. Rhodes was the San Francisco lawyer who as "Caxton" wrote the great short story, "The Case of Summerfield." He was a South Carolinan by birth. His widow published in 1875 his stories and poems under the title, "Caxton's Book," which contained sketches by Daniel O'Connell and General W. H. L. Barnes.

Thus, California, never provincial, either in the log cabin or the metropolis, was a finished civilization set down over night in the early '50s. Its world-wide lure was due to high class publicity, never equalled on any frontier, such as that of "Eulalie," who was able to write home in a compelling way.