I advanced more slowly, and still the thing wavered and flitted with strange eerie lurches.  And then, right before my eyes, it vanished.  I saw it vanish.  Neither to the right nor left did it go, nor backward.  Right there, while I gazed upon it, it faded away, ceased to be.  I didn’t die, but I swear, from what I experienced in those few succeeding moments, that I know full well that men can die of fright.  I stood there, knife in hand, swaying automatically to the roll of the ship, paralysed with fear.  Had the Bricklayer suddenly seized my throat with corporeal fingers and proceeded to throttle me, it would have been no more than I expected.  Dead men did rise up, and that would be the most likely thing the malignant Bricklayer would do.

But he didn’t seize my throat.  Nothing happened.  And, since nature abhors a status, I could not remain there in the one place forever paralysed.  I turned and started aft.  I did not run.  What was the use?  What chance had I against the malevolent world of ghosts?  Flight, with me, was the swiftness of my legs.  The pursuit, with a ghost, was the swiftness of thought.  And there were ghosts.  I had seen one.

And so, stumbling slowly aft, I discovered the explanation of the seeming.  I saw the mizzen topmast lurching across a faint radiance of cloud behind which was the moon.  The idea leaped in my brain.  I extended the line between the cloudy radiance and the mizzen-topmast and found that it must strike somewhere near the fore-rigging on the port side.  Even as I did this, the radiance vanished.  The driving clouds of the breaking gale were alternately thickening and thinning before the face of the moon, but never exposing the face of the moon.  And when the clouds were at their thinnest, it was a very dim radiance that the moon was able to make.  I watched and waited.  The next time the clouds thinned I looked for’ard, and there was the shadow of the topmast, long and attenuated, wavering and lurching on the deck and against the rigging.

This was my first ghost.  Once again have I seen a ghost.  It proved to be a Newfoundland dog, and I don’t know which of us was the more frightened, for I hit that Newfoundland a full right-arm swing to the jaw.  Regarding the Bricklayer’s ghost, I will say that I never mentioned it to a soul on board.  Also, I will say that in all my life I never went through more torment and mental suffering than on that lonely night-watch on the Sophie Sutherland.

(TO THE EDITOR.—­This is not a fiction.  It is a true page out of my life.)

A CLASSIC OF THE SEA

Introduction to “Two Years before the Mast.”

Once in a hundred years is a book written that lives not alone for its own century but which becomes a document for the future centuries.  Such a book is Dana’s.  When Marryat’s and Cooper’s sea novels are gone to dust, stimulating and joyful as they have been to generations of men, still will remain “Two Years Before the Mast.”