Then suddenly a voice about him seemed to be saying, “And a half-seven—­and a half-seven—­” and in a twink the picture in Abel Keeling’s brain changed again.  He was at home again, instructing his son, young Abel, in the casting of the lead from the skiff they had pulled out of the harbour.

“And a half-seven!” the boy seemed to be calling.

Abel Keeling’s blackened lips muttered:  “Excellently well cast, Abel, excellently well cast!”

“And a half-seven—­and a half-seven—­seven—­seven—­”

“Ah,” Abel Keeling murmured, “that last was not a clear cast—­give me the line—­thus it should go ... ay, so....  Soon you shall sail the seas with me in the Mary of the Tower.  You are already perfect in the stars and the motions of the planets; to-morrow I will instruct you in the use of the backstaff....”

For a minute or two he continued to mutter; then he dozed.  When again he came to semi-consciousness it was once more to the sound of bells, at first faint, then louder, and finally becoming a noisy clamour immediately above his head.  It was Bligh.  Bligh, in a fresh attack of delirium, had seized the bell-lanyard and was ringing the bell insanely.  The cord broke in his fingers, but he thrust at the bell with his hand, and again called aloud.

“Upon an harp and an instrument of ten strings ... let Heaven and Earth praise Thy Name!...”

He continued to call aloud, and to beat on the bronze-rusted bell.

"Ship ahoy!  What ship’s that?"

One would have said that a veritable hail had come out of the mists; but Abel Keeling knew those hails that came out of the mists.  They came from ships which were not there.  “Ay, ay, keep a good look-out, and have a care to your lodemanage,” he muttered again to his son....

But, as sometimes a sleeper sits up in his dream, or rises from his couch and walks, so all of a sudden Abel Keeling found himself on his hands and knees on the deck, looking back over his shoulder.  In some deep-seated region of his consciousness he was dimly aware that the cant of the deck had become more perilous, but his brain received the intelligence and forgot it again.  He was looking out into the bright and baffling mists.  The buckler of the sun was of a more ardent silver; the sea below it was lost in brilliant evaporation; and between them, suspended in the haze, no more substantial than the vague darknesses that float before dazzled eyes, a pyramidal phantom-shape hung.  Abel Keeling passed his hand over his eyes, but when he removed it the shape was still there, gliding slowly towards the Mary’s quarter.  Its form changed as he watched it.  The spirit-grey shape that had been a pyramid seemed to dissolve into four upright members, slightly graduated in tallness, that nearest the Mary’s stern the tallest and that to the left the lowest.  It might have been the shadow of the gigantic set of reed-pipes on which that vacant mournful note had been sounded.