By this time I had thrown myself into the shallop, followed reluctantly by Richard Faulder, over whose courage and kindness of heart superstition had great power; and with one push from the shore, and some exertion in sculling, we came within a quoitcast of the unfortunate fisherman.  He stayed not to profit by our aid; for when he perceived us near, he uttered a piercing shriek of joy, and bounded toward us through the agitated element the full length of an oar.  I saw him for a second on the surface of the water; but the eddying current sucked him down; and all I ever beheld of him again was his hand held above the flood, and clutching in agony at some imaginary aid.  I sat gazing in horror on the vacant sea before us:  but a breathing time before, a human being, full of youth and strength and hope, was there:  his cries were still ringing in my ears and echoing in the woods; and now nothing was seen or heard save the turbulent expanse of water, and the sound of its chafing on the shores.  We pushed back our shallop, and resumed our station on the cliff beside the old mariner and his descendant.

“Wherefore sought ye to peril your own lives fruitlessly,” said Mark, “in attempting to save the doomed?  Whoso touches those infernal ships, never survives to tell the tale.  Woe to the man who is found nigh them at midnight when the tide has subsided, and they arise in their former beauty, with forecastle, and deck, and sail, and pennon, and shroud!  Then is seen the streaming of lights along the water from their cabin windows, and then is heard the sound of mirth and the clamor of tongues, and the infernal whoop and halloo, and song, ringing far and wide.  Woe to the man who comes nigh them!”

To all this my Allanbay companion listened with a breathless attention.  I felt something touched with a superstition to which I partly believed I had seen one victim offered up; and I inquired of the old mariner, “How and when came these haunted ships there?  To me they seem but the melancholy relics of some unhappy voyagers, and much more likely to warn people to shun destruction, than entice and delude them to it.”

“And so,” said the old man with a smile, which had more of sorrow in it than of mirth,—­“and so, young man, these black and shattered hulks seem to the eye of the multitude.  But things are not what they seem:  that water, a kind and convenient servant to the wants of man, which seems so smooth, and so dimpling, and so gentle, has swallowed up a human soul even now; and the place which it covers, so fair and so level, is a faithless quicksand, out of which none escape.  Things are otherwise than they seem.  Had you lived as long as I have had the sorrow to live; had you seen the storms, and braved the perils, and endured the distresses which have befallen me; had you sat gazing out on the dreary ocean at midnight on a haunted coast; had you seen comrade after comrade, brother after brother, and son after son, swept away by the merciless ocean from your very side; had you seen the shapes of friends, doomed to the wave and the quicksand, appearing to you in the dreams and visions of the night,—­then would your mind have been prepared for crediting the maritime legends of mariners; and the two haunted Danish ships would have had their terrors for you, as they have for all who sojourn on this coast.