g could follow: that I should watch for ever,
seeing only the Hand and the thing it held, and understanding nothing of
its import. Was the whole universe but a refracting speck upon some
greater Being? Were our worlds but the atoms of another universe, and
those again of another, and so on through an endless progression? And what
was I? Was I indeed immaterial? A vague persuasion of a body gathering
about me came into my suspense. The abysmal darkness about the Hand filled
with impalpable suggestions, with uncertain, fluctuating shapes.

Then, suddenly, came a sound, like the sound of a tolling bell: faint, as
if infinitely far; muffled, as though heard through thick swathings of
darkness: a deep, vibrating resonance, with vast gulfs of silence between
each stroke. And the Hand appeared to tighten on the rod. And I saw far
above the Hand, towards the apex of the darkness, a circle of dim
phosphorescence, a ghostly sphere whence these sounds came throbbing; and
at the last stroke the Hand vanished, for the hour had come, and I heard a
noise of many waters. But the black rod remained as a great band across
the sky. And then a voice, which seemed to run to the uttermost parts of
space, spoke, saying, "There will be no more pain."

At that an almost intolerable gladness and radiance rushed in upon me, and
I saw the circle shining white and bright, and the rod black and shining,
and many things else distinct and clear. And the circle was the face of
the clock, and the rod the rail of my bed. Haddon was standing at the
foot, against the rail, with a small pair of scissors on his fingers; and
the hands of my clock on the mantel over his shoulder were clasped
together over the hour of twelve. Mowbray was washing something in a basin
at the octagonal table, and at my side I felt a subdued feeling that could
scarce be spoken of as pain.

The operation had not killed me. And I perceived, suddenly, that the dull
melancholy of half a year was lifted from my mind.

XIII.

THE SEA RAIDERS.

I.

Until the extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar species
_Haploteuthis ferox_ was known to science only generically, on the
strength of a half-digested tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a
decaying body pecked by birds and nibbled by fish, found early in 1896 by
Mr. Jennings, near Land's End.

In no department of zoological science, indeed, are we quite so much in
the dark as with regard to the deep-sea cephalop