A VERY STRANGE STORY.

Waikato Times, Volume VIII, Issue 412, 5 January 1875, Page 2

A VERY STRANGE STORY.

The following strange story has been communicated to the Indian papers —"We had left Colombo in the steamer Strathowen, had rounded Galle, and were well in the Bay with our course laid for Madras, steaming over a calm and tranquil sea. About an hour before sunset on May 10th, we saw on our starboard team , and about two miles off, a^ small schooner lying becalmed ; there was nothing in her appearance or position to excite remark, but as we came up with her I lazily examined her with my binocular, and then noticed between us, but nearer her, a Ion?, low swelling, lying on the sea, which, from its colour and shape, I took to be a bank of seiweed. As I watched, the mass hitherto at rest on the quiet sea was set in motion. It struck the schooner, which visibly reeled, and then righted j immediately afterwards the masts swayed sideways and with my glass I could clearly discern the enormous mass and the hull of the schooner coalescing, I can think of no other term. Judging .from their exclamations, the other gazers must have witnessed the same appearance. Almost immediately after the collison and coalescene the schooner's masts swayed towards us, lower and lower ; the vessel was on her beam ends, lay there a few seconds, and disappeared, the masts righting as she sank and the main exhibiting a reversed ensign struggling towards its peak. A cry of horror arose from the lookers on ; and, as if by instinct, our ship's head was at one© turned towards the acene, which was nowmarked by the forms of those battling for life— th* sole survivors of the pretty little sohooner, which only twenty minutes before floated bravely on the smooth sea. As soon as the poor fellows were able to tell their story, they astounded us with the assertion that their vessel had been übmerged by a gigantic cuttle nsn or calamary, the animal which, in a smaller form, attracts so much attention in the Brighton Aquarium as the ootopu*. Each narra-