“Can you make out what it’s driving at?”

“Oh, we shall all wake up in a minute....”

“Quiet, I have it; the engines; it wants to know about our engines.  It’ll be wanting to see our papers presently.  Rye Port!...  Well, no harm in humouring it; let’s see what it can make of this.  Ahoy there!” came the voice to Abel Keeling, a little more strongly, as if a shifting wind carried it, and speaking faster and faster as it went on.  “Not wind, but steam; d’you hear?  Steam, steam.  Steam, in eight Yarrow water-tube boilers.  S-t-e-a-m, steam.  Got it?  And we’ve twin-screw triple expansion engines, indicated horse-power four thousand, and we can do 430 revolutions per minute; savvy?  Is there anything your phantomhood would like to know about our armament?...”

Abel Keeling was muttering fretfully to himself.  It annoyed him that words in his own vision should have no meaning for him.  How did words come to him in a dream that he had no knowledge of when wide awake?  The Seapink—­that was the name of this ship; but a pink was long and narrow, low-carged and square-built aft....

“And as for our armament,” the voice with the tones that so profoundly troubled Abel Keeling’s memory continued, “we’ve two revolving Whitehead torpedo-tubes, three six-pounders on the upper deck, and that’s a twelve-pounder forward there by the conning-tower.  I forgot to mention that we’re nickel steel, with a coal capacity of sixty tons in most damnably placed bunkers, and that thirty and a quarter knots is about our top.  Care to come aboard?”

But the voice was speaking still more rapidly and feverishly, as if to fill a silence with no matter what, and the shape that was uttering it was straining forward anxiously over the rail.

“Ugh!  But I’m glad this happened in the daylight,” another voice was muttering.

“I wish I was sure it was happening at all....  Poor old spook!”

“I suppose it would keep its feet if her deck was quite vertical.  Think she’ll go down, or just melt?”

“Kind of go down ... without wash....”

“Listen—­here’s the other one now—­”

For Bligh was singing again: 

“For, Lord, Thou know’st our nature such
  If we great things obtain,
And in the getting of the same
  Do feel no grief or pain,

“We little do esteem thereof;
  But, hardly brought to pass,
A thousand times we do esteem
  More than the other was.”

"But oh, look—­look—­look at the other!...  Oh, I say, wasn’t he a grand old boy!  Look!"