Surely, captain, they are simple in
these parts and easy at the bogeys. 'Twill be roast duck, after
all--and, may-be, the sage thrown in!"

This was all well said, but Dolly Venn, quicker with his eyes, remarked
a stranger fact.

"There's no one about, sir, that I can see," said he, wisely, "and no
lights in the houses either. I wonder where all the people are? It's
curious that we shouldn't see some one."

He put it as a kind of question; but before I could answer him Seth
Barker chimed in with his deep voice, and pointed towards the distant
reef:

"They've lit up the sea, that's what they've done," said he.

"By thunder, they have!" cries Peter Bligh, in his astonishment; "and
generous about it, too. Saw any one such a thing as that?"

He indicated the distant reef, which seemed, as I bear witness, ablaze
with lights. And not only the reef, mark you, but the sea about it, a
cable's length, it may be, to the north and the south, shone like a
pool of fire, yellow and golden, and sometimes with a rare and
beautiful green light when the darkness deepened. Such a spectacle I
shall never see again if I sail a thousand ships! That luscious green
of the rolling seas, the spindrift tossed in crystals of light, foam
running on the rocks, but foam like the water of jewels, a dazzling
radiance--aye, a very carpet of quivering gold. Of this had they made
the northern channel. How it was done, what cleverness worked it, it
needed greater brains than mine to say. I was for all the world like a
man struck dumb with the beauty of something which pleases and awes him
in the same breath.

"Lights under the sea, and people living there! It's enough to make a
man doubt his senses," said I. "And yet the thing's true, lads: we're
sane men and waking; it isn't a story-book. You can prove it for
yourselves."

"Aye, and men going in and out like landsmen to their houses," cried
Peter, almost breathless; "it's a fearsome sight, captain, a fearsome
sight, upon my word."

The rest of us said nothing. We were just a little frightened group
that stared open-mouthed upon a seeming miracle. If we regarded the
things we saw with a seaman's reverence, let no one make complaint of
that. The spectacle was one to awe any man; nor might we forget that
those who appeared to live below the sea lived there, as Ruth Bellenden
had told us, because the island was a death-trap. We were in the trap
and none to show us the road out.

"Peter," said I,