At ten minutes to twelve I was called, and at twelve I was dressed and on deck, relieving the man who had called me.  On the sealing grounds, when hove to, a watch of only a single man is kept through the night, each man holding the deck for an hour.  It was a dark night, though not a black one.  The gale was breaking up, and the clouds were thinning.  There should have been a moon, and, though invisible, in some way a dim, suffused radiance came from it.  I paced back and forth across the deck amidships.  My mind was filled with the event of the day and with the horrible tales my shipmates had told, and yet I dare to say, here and now, that I was not afraid.  I was a healthy animal, and furthermore, intellectually, I agreed with Swinburne that dead men rise up never.  The Bricklayer was dead, and that was the end of it.  He would rise up never—­at least, never on the deck of the Sophie Sutherland.  Even then he was in the ocean depths miles to windward of our leeward drift, and the likelihood was that he was already portioned out in the maws of many sharks.  Still, my mind pondered on the tales of the ghosts of dead men I had heard, and I speculated on the spirit world.  My conclusion was that if the spirits of the dead still roamed the world they carried the goodness or the malignancy of the earth-life with them.  Therefore, granting the hypothesis (which I didn’t grant at all), the ghost of the Bricklayer was bound to be as hateful and malignant as he in life had been.  But there wasn’t any Bricklayer’s ghost—­that I insisted upon.

A few minutes, thinking thus, I paced up and down.  Then, glancing casually for’ard, along the port side, I leaped like a startled deer and in a blind madness of terror rushed aft along the poop, heading for the cabin.  Gone was all my arrogance of youth and my intellectual calm.  I had seen a ghost.  There, in the dim light, where we had flung the dead man overboard, I had seen a faint and wavering form.  Six-feet in length it was, slender, and of substance so attenuated that I had distinctly seen through it the tracery of the fore-rigging.

As for me, I was as panic-stricken as a frightened horse.  I, as I, had ceased to exist.  Through me were vibrating the fibre-instincts of ten thousand generations of superstitious forebears who had been afraid of the dark and the things of the dark.  I was not I. I was, in truth, those ten thousand forebears.  I was the race, the whole human race, in its superstitious infancy.  Not until part way down the cabin-companionway did my identity return to me.  I checked my flight and clung to the steep ladder, suffocating, trembling, and dizzy.  Never, before nor since, have I had such a shock.  I clung to the ladder and considered.  I could not doubt my senses.  That I had seen something there was no discussion.  But what was it?  Either a ghost or a joke.  There could be nothing else.  If a ghost, the question was:  would it appear again?  If it did not, and I aroused the ship’s officers, I would make myself the laughing stock of all on board.  And by the same token, if it were a joke, my position would be still more ridiculous.  If I were to retain my hard-won place of equality, it would never do to arouse any one until I ascertained the nature of the thing.