“What’s the matter?” inquired the mate in alarm.

The other, who did not appear to hear the question, made no answer, but continued to stare in a most extraordinary fashion at a bottle which graced the centre of the table.

“What is it?” inquired the mate, not venturing to trust his eyes.  “Water?  Where did it come from?”

“Cook!” roared the skipper, turning a bloodshot eye on that worthy, as his pallid face showed behind the mate, “what’s this?  If you say it’s water I’ll kill you.”

“I don’t know what it is, sir,” said the cook cautiously; “but Dick sent it to you with his best respects, and I was to say as there’s plenty more where that came from.  He’s a nasty, under’anded, deceitful old man, is Dick, sir, an’ it seems he laid in a stock o’ water in bottles an’ the like afore you doctored the cask, an’ the men have had it locked up in their chests ever since.”

“Dick’s a very clever old man,” remarked the mate, pouring himself out a glass, and drinking it with infinite relish, “ain’t he, cap’n?  It’ll be a privilege to jine anything that man’s connected with, won’t it?”

He paused for a reply, but none came, for the cap’n, with dim eyes, was staring blankly into a future so lonely and uncongenial that he had lost the power of speech—­even of that which, at other crises, had never failed to afford him relief.  The mate gazed at him curiously for a moment, and then, imitating the example of the cook, quitted the cabin.

IN MID-ATLANTIC

“No, sir,” said the night-watchman, as he took a seat on a post at the end of the jetty, and stowed a huge piece of tobacco in his cheek.  “No, man an’ boy, I was at sea forty years afore I took on this job, but I can’t say as ever I saw a real, downright ghost.”

This was disappointing, and I said so.  Previous experience of the power of Bill’s vision had led me to expect something very different.

“Not but what I’ve known some queer things happen,” said Bill, fixing his eyes on the Surrey side, and going off into a kind of trance.  “Queer things.”

I waited patiently; Bill’s eyes, after resting for some time on Surrey, began to slowly cross the river, paused midway in reasonable hopes of a collision between a tug with its flotilla of barges and a penny steamer, and then came back to me.

“You heard that yarn old Cap’n Harris was telling the other day about the skipper he knew having a warning one night to alter his course, an’ doing so, picked up five live men and three dead skeletons in a open boat?” he inquired.

I nodded.

“The yarn in various forms is an old one,” said I.

“It’s all founded on something I told him once,” said Bill.  “I don’t wish to accuse Cap’n Harris of taking another man’s true story an’ spoiling it; he’s got a bad memory, that’s all.  Fust of all, he forgets he ever heard the yarn; secondly, he goes and spoils it.”