boo, and made her
fast to a root. Then I fed the fire, lay down again, and watched her
back and fill on her tether,--all clear and ruddy in the flame, even
the carvings, and the little wooden figures of wizards on her deck. And
while I looked, I grew drowsier and drowsier; my eyes would close, then
half open, and there would be the _hantu_ sails and the fire for
company, growing more and more indistinct.

So much for Certainty; now begins the Other. Did I fall asleep at all?
If so, was my first waking a dream-waking, and the real one only when
the thing was gone? I'm not an imaginative man; my mind, at home,
usually worked with some precision; but this,--there seems to be, you
might say, a blur, a--film over my mental retina. You see, I'm not a
psychologist, and therefore can't use the big, foggy terms of man's
conceit to explain what he never can explain,--himself, and Life.

* * * * *

The captain tossed his cheroot overboard, and was silent for a space.

"The psychologists forget AEsop's frog story," he said at last. "Little
swollen Egos, again."

Then his voice flowed on, slowly, in the dark.

* * * * *

I ask you just to believe this much: that I for my part feel sure
(except sometimes by daylight) that I was not more than half asleep when
a footfall seemed to come in the path, and waked me entirely. It didn't
sound,--only seemed to come. I believe, then, that I woke, roused up on
my elbow, and stared over at the opening among the bamboos where the
path came into the clearing. Some one moved down the bank, and drew
slowly forward to the edge of the firelight. A strange, whispering,
uncertain kind of voice said something,--something in Dutch.

I didn't catch the words, and it spoke again:--

"What night of the month is this night?"

If awake, I was just enough so to think this a natural question to be
asked first off, out here in the wilds.

"It's the 6th," I answered in Dutch. "Come down to the fire, Mynheer."

You know how bleary and sightless your eyes are for a moment, waking,
after the glare of these days. The figure seemed to come a little
nearer, but I could only see that it was a man dressed in black. Even
that didn't seem odd.

"Of what month?" the stranger said. The voice was what the French call
"veiled."

"June," I answered.

"And what year?" he asked.

I told him--or It.

"He is very late," said the voice, like a sigh. "