--which, to my mind, never betray their immeasurable
distance so clearly as when one is in mid-ocean--with the sough and moan
of the night wind and the soft, seething hiss of the sea whispering in
one's ears, the feeling of loneliness becomes almost an obsession, the
sense of all-pervading mystery persistently obtrudes itself, and one
quickly falls into a condition of readiness to believe the most
incredible of the countless weird stories that sailors love to relate to
each other, especially when this condition of credulity is helped, as it
sometimes is, by the sudden irruption of some strange, unaccountable
sound, or succession of sounds, upon the peaceful quietude and serenity
of the night. These sounds are occasionally of the weirdest and most
hair-raising quality; and while the startled listener may possibly have
heard it asserted, time and again, by superior persons, that they
emanate from sea birds, or from fish, he is perfectly satisfied that
neither sea birds nor fish have ever been known to emit such sounds _in
the daytime_, and the strain of superstition within him awakes and
whispers all sorts of uncanny suggestions, the sea bird and fish theory
being rejected with scorn. Moreover, those harrowingly mysterious
sounds seem never to make themselves audible save when the accompanying
circumstances are such as to conduce to the most startling and thrilling
effect; thus, although I had now been knocking about at sea for more
than three years, and had met with many queer experiences, I had never,
thus far, heard a sound that I could not reasonably account for and
attribute to some known source; yet on this particular night--my second
night alone in the longboat--I was sitting comfortably enough in the
stern-sheets, steering by a star--for I had no lantern wherewith to
illuminate my compass--and thinking of nothing in particular, when
suddenly a most unearthly cry came pealing out of the darkness on the
starboard beam, seemingly not half a dozen yards away, and was twice
repeated.

I felt the hair of my scalp bristle, and a violent shudder thrilled
through me as those dreadful cries smote upon my ear, for they seemed to
be the utterance of some human being in the very last extremity of both
physical and mental anguish, the protest of a lost soul being wrenched
violently out of its sinful human tenement, cries of such utter,
unimaginable despair as the finite mind of man is unable to find a cause
for. Yet, despite