e
crescent moon, it was the strangest craft that he had ever seen. Even
as he gazed it glided on nearer and nearer, and at last beached itself
noiselessly on the sands before his own feet. A score of figures
as bizarre and outlandish as the ship itself now thronged its high
forecastle--really a castle in shape and warlike purpose--and leaped
from its ports. The common seamen were nearly naked to the waist; the
officers looked more like soldiers than sailors. What struck him more
strangely was that they were one and all seemingly unconscious of the
existence of the lighthouse, sauntering up and down carelessly, as if on
some uninhabited strand, and even talking--so far as he could understand
their old bookish dialect--as if in some hitherto undiscovered land.
Their ignorance of the geography of the whole coast, and even of the sea
from which they came, actually aroused his critical indignation; their
coarse and stupid allusions to the fair Indian swimmer as the "mermaid"
that they had seen upon their bow made him more furious still. Yet
he was helpless to express his contemptuous anger, or even make them
conscious of his presence. Then an interval of incoherency and utter
blankness followed. When he again took up the thread of his fancy
the ship seemed to be lying on her beam ends on the sand; the strange
arrangement of her upper deck and top-hamper, more like a dwelling than
any ship he had ever seen, was fully exposed to view, while the seamen
seemed to be at work with the rudest contrivances, calking and scraping
her barnacled sides. He saw that phantom crew, when not working, at
wassail and festivity; heard the shouts of drunken roisterers; saw the
placing of a guard around some of the most uncontrollable, and later
detected the stealthy escape of half a dozen sailors inland, amidst the
fruitless volley fired upon them from obsolete blunderbusses. Then
his strange vision transported him inland, where he saw these seamen
following some Indian women. Suddenly one of them turned and ran
frenziedly towards him as if seeking succor, closely pursued by one of
the sailors. Pomfrey strove to reach her, struggled violently with the
fearful apathy that seemed to hold his limbs, and then, as she uttered
at last a little musical cry, burst his bonds and--awoke!

As consciousness slowly struggled back to him, he could see the bare
wooden-like walls of his sleeping-room, the locker, the one window
bright with sunlight, the open do