dow were blazing with lights, and
there was a noise of singing and fiddling on her decks. "He's gone!"
shouted landlord above the storm, "and he's taken half the village with
him." I could only nod in answer, not having lungs like bellows of
leather.

In the morning we were able to measure the strength of the storm, and
over and above my pigsty, there was damage enough wrought in the village
to keep us busy. True it is that the children had to break down no
branches for the firing that autumn, since the wind had strewn the woods
with more than they could carry away. Many of our ghosts were scattered
abroad, but this time very few came back, all the young men having
sailed with captain; and not only ghosts, for a poor half-witted lad was
missing, and we reckoned that he had stowed himself away or perhaps
shipped as cabin-boy, not knowing any better.

What with the lamentations of the ghost girls and the grumblings of
families who had lost ancestors, the village was upset for a while, and
the funny thing was that it was the folk who had complained most of the
carryings-on of the youngsters who made most noise now that they were
gone. I hadn't any sympathy with shoemaker or butcher, who ran about
saying how much they missed their lads, but it made me grieve to hear
the poor bereaved girls calling their lovers by name on the village
green at nightfall. It didn't seem fair to me that they should have lost
their men a second time, after giving up life in order to join them, as
like as not. Still, not even a spirit can be sorry forever, and after a
few months we made up our mind that the folk who had sailed in the ship
were never coming back; and we didn't talk about it any more.

And then one day, I dare say it would be a couple of years after, when
the whole business was quite forgotten, who should come trapesing along
the road from Portsmouth but the daft lad who had gone away with the
ship without waiting till he was dead to become a ghost. You never saw
such a boy as that in all your life. He had a great rusty cutlass
hanging to a string at his waist, and he was tattooed all over in fine
colors, so that even his face looked like a girl's sampler. He had a
handkerchief in his hand full of foreign shells and old-fashioned pieces
of small money, very curious, and he walked up to the well outside his
mother's house and drew himself a drink as if he had been nowhere in
particular.

The worst of it was that he had come back