troubling himself about the steps, leaped right down.

"What's the matter with Ikey?" said one of the men. "Showing us how he
can jump?"

"Nonsense!" said Rodd. "It was as if he had been scared by something.
He looked quite wild."

The boy walked close up to the rail and looked over, to see that the
whole of the water right away from the bows was apparently ablaze with
fire; but for a time he could make out nothing else, in spite of its
crystal clearness and the way in which in addition it was laced and
latticed as it were by the rays of the moon.

Seeing nothing for the moment likely to have alarmed the sailor, he was
about to turn off, but only to start the next minute, and stand clinging
with both hands to the rail, for some fifteen or twenty yards away the
erst calm, heaving sea began to be violently agitated, running as it
were with the swiftness of a mill-stream; and then something dull and
glistening and shining like a halo appeared just beneath the surface,
rising till it was quite clear of the water, and passing the schooner in
one broad pale streak.

He was too much astonished to be startled, and for a few moments the
only idea that he could form was that a good-sized vessel had careened
over on to its side and was swiftly gliding along almost level with the
water.

Then all at once something of the same moonlit glistening tint, but long
and sinuous, slowly rose up eight or ten feet above the sea; then higher
and higher till it was double that altitude, and in his excitement and
agitation he realised that it was ended or begun by a snake-like head
something after the fashion of that of a huge conger, the eyes being
many inches across and dull and heavy after the fashion seen in a
deep-sea fish.

One moment he thought it eel-like, the next that it was some serpent,
while to his utter astonishment what he took to be its neck rose higher
in a graceful swan-like shape, beautiful in curve as it was horrible in
its gleaming, pallid, slimy aspect. One of the great eyes seemed turned
to him with a peculiar glare, while as he fixed his own upon it as if
unable to resist the attraction, he made out that from behind the curve
the elongated body of the creature rose just above the surface, carrying
out the semblance on a great scale to some swan-like half-fishy
creature, and then with a quick rush as if the water were being hurled
from it by enormously powerful fin-like paddles, the strange fish,
reptile, or