I am not superstitious.  I have never met a man who was.  And look at the ships in dock today, without figure-heads, with masts that are only the support of derricks and the aerials of wireless, and with science and an official certificate of competency even in the galley!  Could anything happen in such ships to bring one to awe and wonder?  The dark of the human mind is now lighted, one may say, with electricity.  We have no shadows to make us hesitate.  That book of sea superstitions was on my table, some weeks later, and a sailor, who gave up trading to the East to patrol mine-fields for three years, and who has never been known to lose any time when in doubt through wasting it on a secret propitiatory gesture, picked up the book, smiling a little superciliously, lost his smile when examining it, and then asked if he might borrow it.

We are not superstitious, now we are sure a matter may be mysterious only when we have not had the leisure to test it in the right way, but we have our private reservations.  There is a ship’s doctor, who has been called a hard case by those who know him, for he has grown grey and serious in watching humanity from the Guinea Coast to the South Seas.  He only smiles now when listening to a religious or a political discussion, and might not be supposed to have any more regard for the mysteries than you would find in the Cold Storage Gazette.  When he is home again we go to the British Museum.  He always takes me there.  It is one of his weaknesses.  I invited him, when last we were there, to let us search out a certain exhibit from Egypt about which curious stories are whispered.  “No you don’t,” he exclaimed peremptorily.  He gave me no argument, but I gathered that it is very well to be funny about such coincidences, yet that one never certainly knows, and that it is better to regard the unexplored dark with a well-simulated respect till one can see through it.  He had, he said, known of affairs in the East, and they were not provided for in the books; he had tried to see through them from all points, but not with the satisfaction he desired.  For that reason he never invited trouble unless he knew it was not there.

Another man, very like him, a master mariner, and one who knew me well enough for secrets, was bringing me from the French Coast for Barry at full speed, in a fog.  He was a clever, but an indiscreet navigator.  I was mildly rebuking him by the door of his chart-room for his foolhardiness, but he laughed quietly, said he intended to make a good passage, which his owners expected, and that when the problem was straightforward he used science, but that when it was all a fog he trusted mainly to his instinct, or whatever it might be, to inform him in time.  I was not to be alarmed.  We should have the Lizard eight miles on the starboard beam in another hour and a half.  By this time we were continuing our talk in the chart-room.  An old cap of his was on the floor, upside down.  I faced him there,