ing touched with a superstition to which I partly believed I
had seen one victim offered up; and I inquired of the old mariner, "How
and when came these Haunted Ships there? To me they seem but the
melancholy relics of some unhappy voyagers, and much more likely to warn
people to shun destruction than entice and delude them to it."

"And so," said the old man with a smile, which had more of sorrow in it
than of mirth; "and so, young man, these black and shattered hulks seem
to the eye of the multitude. But things are not what they seem: that
water, a kind and convenient servant to the wants of man, which seems so
smooth and so dimpling and so gentle, has swallowed up a human soul even
now; and the place which it covers, so fair and so level, is a faithless
quicksand, out of which none escape. Things are otherwise than they
seem. Had you lived as long as I have had the sorrow to live; had you
seen the storms, and braved the perils, and endured the distresses which
have befallen me; had you sat gazing out on the dreary ocean at midnight
on a haunted coast; had you seen comrade after comrade, brother after
brother, and son after son, swept away by the merciless ocean from your
very side; had you seen the shapes of friends, doomed to the wave and the
quicksand, appearing to you in the dreams and visions of the night, then
would your mind have been prepared for crediting the maritime legends of
mariners; and the two haunted Danish ships would have had their terrors
for you, as they have for all who sojourn on this coast.

"Of the time and the cause of their destruction," continued the old man,
"I know nothing certain; they have stood as you have seen them for
uncounted time; and while all other ships wrecked on this unhappy coast
have gone to pieces, and rotted and sunk away in a few years, these two
haunted hulks have neither sunk in the quicksand, nor has a single spar
or board been displaced. Maritime legend says that two ships of Denmark
having had permission, for a time, to work deeds of darkness and dolor on
the deep, were at last condemned to the whirlpool and the sunken rock,
and were wrecked in this bonnie bay, as a sign to seamen to be gentle and
devout. The night when they were lost was a harvest evening of uncommon
mildness and beauty: the sun had newly set; the moon came brighter and
brighter out; and the reapers, laying their sickles at the root of the
standing corn, stood on rock and bank, looking at the