Salve stood and listened, as the conversation took this turn.

“We have pilots in Norway, too,” she said, “who don’t mind a wet jacket either.  It is a fine life!”

The Dutchman merely observed, coldly, in reply—­

“In two successive years—­it is three years ago now—­they lost out here off Amland a total of fifty pilots.”

“Still, it is a fine life!” she said; and Salve resumed his walk.

A couple of evenings after, the Apollo was pitching out on the Doggerbank in the moonlight, with a reef in her topsails.  Elizabeth had not yet gone below, and was sitting with her child warmly wrapped up on her lap, while Salve paced the deck and looked at her from time to time.  A little farther off, near the main-hatch, Nils Buvaagen (whom Salve had met again at Notteroe, and persuaded to take service with him) and a couple of the crew who were off duty were engaged in story-telling, the others lounging about near them to listen.  Elizabeth, too, was listening.

They had crossed that day a long stretch of dead water, and the carpenter had several mysterious incidents, of which he declared he had been an eyewitness, to recount on the head of it.  Meeting dead water like that out in the open sea generally meant that something was going to happen.

Nils Buvaagen, like all fjord peasants, had a strong leaning towards every kind of superstition; and in his many voyages across the North Sea, he had had more than one experience of the kind in question.  He had sat quite silent so far.

“H’m!” he remarked now, thoughtfully taking a pull at his pipe.  “I dare be sworn there’s many a one out here on the Dogger.  Where we are now, I tell you, is as it might be an old burial-ground.”

With that he retired into himself, and began to pull away vigorously at his pipe, as if he had unintentionally said more than he exactly liked.  But being pressed to go on, he was obliged to satisfy the curiosity he had excited, and resumed accordingly in a hushed tone, after cautiously looking round first.

“Do you know,” he asked, mysteriously, “how all the old fish come by their deaths?”

None of his audience were able to give an answer to this unexpected question.

“You don’t?” he continued; “nor no one else neither.  But all the same, such myriads die every day that, if all was right, the whole surface of the sea would be covered with their white bellies—­we should be sailing all day long through dead fish.  It is a ‘mystery,’ the same as it is what becomes of all the old ships in the world.”  Coming from him, that word “mystery” had something very weird and uncanny about it.

“Yes, the Dogger can be ugly enough, and may be so perhaps before we are clear of it,” he concluded, and leant back against the spar behind him to look up at the clouds.  Some scud was driving at the moment across the full moon.

“But about the old fish and the old vessels, Nils?” said the carpenter, recalling him to the subject.