the ship was a lengthy task, and it was nearly one
o'clock in the morning before that task was completed and the exhausted
men were once more down on deck.

It was about half an hour later that there came to the crew of the
_Nonsuch_ the first premonition of a happening so extraordinary and so
gruesome that the historian hesitates to record it, yet, after all, the
story but adds one more to the already innumerable confirmations of the
statement that "truth is stranger than fiction."

The men had distributed themselves here and there about the main deck,
after searching with some care for such spots as were favoured with a
light draught of wind set up by the slow roll of the ship upon the oil-
smooth swell, and had disposed themselves to court sleep, if
peradventure it would visit them and so bring relief from the heat and
closeness of the suffocating night, while the young captain and Dyer,
the pilot, occupied chairs on the poop, where they sat patiently
watching for what might next happen--but it is safe to say, never
dreaming of what that happening was to be, for their thoughts went not a
step beyond the matter of weather.

The night was still intensely dark, so dark indeed that the feeble
glimmer of the low-turned lamp in the main cabin, shining through the
skylight and faintly irradiating the deck planks in its immediate
vicinity was almost irritatingly dazzling, since it effectually blinded
the sight to everything outside the irradiated area, and at length
George rose to his feet with the intention of calling an order to have
the skylight masked by a tarpaulin, when, as he stood upright and his
head rose above the level of the bulwark rail, a faint whiff of a
strange but peculiarly disgusting and offensive odour assailed his
nostrils.

"Phew!" he ejaculated, forgetting all about the tarpaulin in the
sensation of wonder evoked by the strangeness of the effluvium--"what in
the world doth this mean? Dost catch it, Dyer?"

"Catch what?" demanded Dyer, also rising to his feet. "Phew!" he
continued, as the smell struck his nostrils--"Catch it? That do I, with
a murrain on it! Now, what doth this portend? There's no land nearer
to us than our treasure island, and it cometh not thence, I dare swear,
the smell's too strong for that; indeed I'd say that it cometh from
close alongside--and maybe it doth, too; the smell's not unlike to
stinking fish, yet there be something else to it beside. And it 'tis a
dead fis