his a blurred and faint
outline of the features of the seaman called "Four-Eyes," who had come
to me at the Hotel Scribe with the bidding to go aboard _La France_.
But what, perhaps, was even more difficult to be understood was the
picture of the great hull of what I judged to be a warship, showing her
a-building, with the work yet progressing on her decks. The newspaper
cuttings I deemed to be in some part an explanation of these sketches,
for one of them gave a description of a very noteworthy battleship,
constructed for a South American Republic, but in much secrecy; while
another hinted that great pains had been taken with the vessel, which
was built at a mighty cost, and on so new a plan that the shipwrights
refused to give information concerning her until she had been some
months at sea to prove her.

All this reading remained enigmatical, of course, and as I could make
nothing of it to connect it with the events I have narrated, I went on
to the writing, which was fine and small, as the writing of an exact
man. And the words upon the head of it were these:--

SOME ACCOUNT OF A NAMELESS WARSHIP,

OF HER CREW, AND HER PURPOSE.

_Written for the eyes of Mark Strong, by Martin Hall, sometime
his friend._

I put from me the sorrow of the thought which the last three words
brought to me, and read therefrom this history, which had these few
sentences as its preface:--

"You read these words, Mark Strong, when I am dead; and I would ask
you before you go further with them to consider well if you would
wish, or have inclination for, a pursuit in which I have lost all
that a man can lose, and in which your risk, do you take the work
upon you, will be no less than mine was. For if you read what is
written here, and have in you that stuff which cannot brook
mystery, and is fired when mystery also is danger, I know that you
will venture upon this undertaking at the point where death has
held my hand; and that by so doing you may reap where I have sown.
And with this, think nor act in any haste lest you lay to my charge
that which may befall you in the pursuit you are about to begin."

I read on, for the desire to do justice to Martin Hall was strong upon
me at the very beginning of it.

From that place the story was in great part autobiographical, but in no
sense egotistical. It was, as you shall see, the simple narration of a
man sincere in his dreaming, i