e Vigny_, in which Elmer was serving his
apprenticeship as a cadet officer.

The old cadet had just come up on the bridge from taking a sounding--he
even had a specimen of the bottom in his hand, he said later, sand with
black specks and broken shell--when something queer attracted his
attention half a point on the starboard bow. It was a thick foggy night,
ships bellowing all round, and a weird-looking tow coming up astern with
a string of lights one over another like a lot of Chinese lanterns. It
was probably these lights that had drawn the mate's attention away from
the ship's bows.

At all events he was standing with a megaphone to his ear hearkening for
noises on the port hand when Elmer took him by the elbow and called out:
"What in the name of Sam Hill would you call that great contraption
mouching across our bows? My sorrows, Fred, it's a schooner!"

The mate went cold along his spine, and the vertebrae distributed there
jostled together like knucklebones on the back of a girl's hand, and he
yelled "Port helm!"

"I told Fred," Elmer said in discussing this circumstance later with
his cronies of the Tall Stove Club--he had got back safe and sound to
Winter Harbor by that time--"I says to him, 'Fred, we're going to bump
into that ship jest as sure as taxes!' There he stood, swearing a blue
streak. I never knew a man to be so downright profane over the little
things of life as he was. And I was right when it come to that too.
There was that long Spanish ghost of a schooner dead in our path, with
her port light shining out there as red as an apple. They wanted me to
say later--I know the skipper come to me personally and says, 'Elmer,
now you know you didn't see no light.' 'Captain Tin,' I says to him, 'I
have got the greatest respect for you as a man, and I would favor you in
all ways possible if 'twas so 'st I could; but if I was to testify the
way you want me to I would go against conscience. I wouldn't feel that I
could go on paying my pew tax. These people here want to know the truth
and I am going to give it to them.' Yes, sir, I saw the light as plain
as plain, and I pointed it out to Fred, but the devil and Tom Walker
couldn't have prevented them ships from walking right up and into each
other, situated as they was then.

"My conscience, warn't there works when those two come together! 'Fred,'
I says--I was down on my knees; throwed there, you understand--'we're
hit!' 'Tell me something I don't know, wi