ken a dead man's bunk and lived to
the end of the voyage. They instanced case after case in their personal
experience. I was obdurate. Then they begged and pleaded with me, and
my pride was tickled in that they showed they really liked me and were
concerned about me. This but served to confirm me in my madness. I
moved in, and, lying in the dead man's bunk, all afternoon and evening
listened to dire prophecies of my future. Also were told stories of
awful deaths and gruesome ghosts that secretly shivered the hearts of all
of us. Saturated with this, yet scoffing at it, I rolled over at the end
of the second dog-watch and went to sleep.

At ten minutes to twelve I was called, and at twelve I was dressed and on
deck, relieving the man who had called me. On the sealing grounds, when
hove to, a watch of only a single man is kept through the night, each man
holding the deck for an hour. It was a dark night, though not a black
one. The gale was breaking up, and the clouds were thinning. There
should have been a moon, and, though invisible, in some way a dim,
suffused radiance came from it. I paced back and forth across the deck
amidships. My mind was filled with the event of the day and with the
horrible tales my shipmates had told, and yet I dare to say, here and
now, that I was not afraid. I was a healthy animal, and furthermore,
intellectually, I agreed with Swinburne that dead men rise up never. The
Bricklayer was dead, and that was the end of it. He would rise up
never--at least, never on the deck of the _Sophie Sutherland_. Even then
he was in the ocean depths miles to windward of our leeward drift, and
the likelihood was that he was already portioned out in the maws of many
sharks. Still, my mind pondered on the tales of the ghosts of dead men I
had heard, and I speculated on the spirit world. My conclusion was that
if the spirits of the dead still roamed the world they carried the
goodness or the malignancy of the earth-life with them. Therefore,
granting the hypothesis (which I didn't grant at all), the ghost of the
Bricklayer was bound to be as hateful and malignant as he in life had
been. But there wasn't any Bricklayer's ghost--that I insisted upon.

A few minutes, thinking thus, I paced up and down. Then, glancing
casually for'ard, along the port side, I leaped like a startled deer and
in a blind madness of terror rushed aft along the poop, heading for the
cabin. Gone was all my arrogance o