in rebuke of this reliance on instinct, but he was staring at the cap, a little startled.  Then he dashed past me without a word for the bridge.  While following him at leisure I heard the telegraph ring.  Outside I could see nothing but the pallor of a blind world.  The flat sea was but the fugitive lustre of what might have been water; but all melted into nothing at a distance which could have been anywhere.  The tremor of the ship lessened, and the noise of the wash fell, for the speed had slackened.  We might have become hushed, and were waiting, listening and anxious, for something that was invisible, but threatening.  Then I heard the skippers voice, quick but quiet, and arrived on the bridge in time to see the man at the wheel putting it hard over.  Something had been sighted ahead of us, and now was growing broad on the starboard bow—­a faint presentment of land, high and unrelated, for there was a luminous void below it.  It was a filmy and coloured ghost in the sky, with a thin shine upon it of a sun we could not see.  It grew more material as we watched it, and brighter, a near and indubitable coast.  “I know where I am now,” said the skipper.  “Another minute or two, and we should have been on the Manacles.”

Smiling a little awkwardly, he explained that he had seen that old cap on the floor before, without knowing how it could have got there, and at the same time he had felt very nervous, without knowing why.  The last time was when, homeward bound in charge of a fine steamer, he hoped Finisterre was distant, but not too far off.  Just about there, as it were; and that his dead reckoning was correct.  The weather had been dirty, the seas heavy, and the sun invisible.  He went on, to find nothing but worse weather.  He did sight, however, two other steamers, on the same course as himself, evidently having calculated to pass Ushant in the morning; his own calculation.  He would be off Ushant later, for his speed was less than theirs.  There they were, a lucky and unexpected confirmation of his own reasoning.  His chief officer, an elderly man full of doubt, smiled again, and smacked his hands together.  That was all right.  My friend then went into the chart-room, and underwent the strange experience we know.  He wondered a little, concluded it was just as well to be on the safe side, and slightly altered his course.  Early next morning he sighted Ushant.  There was nothing to spare.  He was, indeed, cutting it fine.  The seas were great, and piled up on the rocks of that bad coast were the two steamers he had sighted the day before.