h a sound like
the breaking of froth in a champagne-glass.

"What's the matter with you?" asked Halyard, sharply.

"A fish came up under my hand," I said; "a porpoise or something--"

With a low cry, the pretty nurse clasped my arm in both her hands.

"Listen!" she whispered. "It's purring around the boat."

"What the devil's purring?" shouted Halyard. "I won't have anything
purring around me!"

At that moment, to my amazement, I saw that the boat had stopped
entirely, although the sail was full and the small pennant fluttered
from the mast-head. Something, too, was tugging at the rudder,
twisting and jerking it until the tiller strained and creaked in my
hand. All at once it snapped; the tiller swung useless and the boat
whirled around, heeling in the stiffening wind, and drove shoreward.

It was then that I, ducking to escape the boom, caught a glimpse of
something ahead--something that a sudden wave seemed to toss on deck
and leave there, wet and flapping--a man with round, fixed, fishy
eyes, and soft, slaty skin.

But the horror of the thing were the two gills that swelled and
relaxed spasmodically, emitting a rasping, purring sound--two gasping,
blood-red gills, all fluted and scolloped and distended.

Frozen with amazement and repugnance, I stared at the creature; I felt
the hair stirring on my head and the icy sweat on my forehead.

"It's the harbor-master!" screamed Halyard.

The harbor-master had gathered himself into a wet lump, squatting
motionless in the bows under the mast; his lidless eyes were
phosphorescent, like the eyes of living codfish. After a while I felt
that either fright or disgust was going to strangle me where I sat,
but it was only the arms of the pretty nurse clasped around me in a
frenzy of terror.

There was not a fire-arm aboard that we could get at. Halyard's hand
crept backward where a steel-shod boat-hook lay, and I also made a
clutch at it. The next moment I had it in my hand, and staggered
forward, but the boat was already tumbling shoreward among the
breakers, and the next I knew the harbor-master ran at me like a
colossal rat, just as the boat rolled over and over through the surf,
spilling freight and passengers among the sea-weed-covered rocks.

When I came to myself I was thrashing about knee-deep in a rocky pool,
blinded by the water and half suffocated, while under my feet, like a
stranded porpoise, the harbor-master made the water boil in his
efforts to upset