At the mention of ghosts Captain Johns became shy, in his perplexed, sly, and unlovely manner.

Captain Ashton winked.

“Yes.  And then perhaps you would get a chance to have a communication with the world of spirits.  Surely the ghosts of seamen should haunt ships.  Some of them would be sure to call on an old shipmate.”

Captain Sellers remarked drily: 

“Don’t raise his hopes like this.  It’s cruel.  He won’t see anything.  You know, Johns, that nobody has ever seen a ghost.”

At this intolerable provocation Captain Johns came out of his reserve.  With no perplexity whatever, but with a positive passion of credulity giving momentary lustre to his dull little eyes, he brought up a lot of authenticated instances.  There were books and books full of instances.  It was merest ignorance to deny supernatural apparitions.  Cases were published every month in a special newspaper.  Professor Cranks saw ghosts daily.  And Professor Cranks was no small potatoes either.  One of the biggest scientific men living.  And there was that newspaper fellow—­what’s his name?—­who had a girl-ghost visitor.  He printed in his paper things she said to him.  And to say there were no ghosts after that!

“Why, they have been photographed!  What more proof do you want?”

Captain Johns was indignant.  Captain Bell’s lips twitched, but Captain Ashton protested now.

“For goodness’ sake don’t keep him going with that.  And by the by, Johns, who’s that hairy pirate you’ve got for your new mate?  Nobody in the Dock seems to have seen him before.”

Captain Johns, pacified by the change of subjects, answered simply that Willy, the tobacconist at the corner of Fenchurch Street, had sent him along.

Willy, his shop, and the very house in Fenchurch Street, I believe, are gone now.  In his time, wearing a careworn, absent-minded look on his pasty face, Willy served with tobacco many southern-going ships out of the Port of London.  At certain times of the day the shop would be full of shipmasters.  They sat on casks, they lounged against the counter.

Many a youngster found his first lift in life there; many a man got a sorely needed berth by simply dropping in for four pennyworth of birds’-eye at an auspicious moment.  Even Willy’s assistant, a redheaded, uninterested, delicate-looking young fellow, would hand you across the counter sometimes a bit of valuable intelligence with your box of cigarettes, in a whisper, lips hardly moving, thus:  “The Bellona, South Dock.  Second officer wanted.  You may be in time for it if you hurry up.”

And didn’t one just fly!

“Oh, Willy sent him,” said Captain Ashton.  “He’s a very striking man.  If you were to put a red sash round his waist and a red handkerchief round his head he would look exactly like one of them buccaneering chaps that made men walk the plank and carried women off into captivity.  Look out, Johns, he don’t cut your throat for you and run off with the Sapphire.  What ship has he come out of last?”