opened it then they would have wept and
sung. I was well content to wait, for I knew my man had the story, and
it was such a one as had profoundly stirred the incredulity of the
faithless.

He entered and greeted me, and sat down and called for brandy. He was
a hard man to turn from his purpose, and, uncorking my iron bottle, I
sought to dissuade him from brandy for fear that when the brandy, bit
his throat he should refuse to leave it for any other wine. He lifted
his head and said deep and dreadful things of any man that should dare
to speak against brandy.

I swore that I said nothing against brandy but added that it was often
given to children, while Gorgondy was only drunk by men of such
depravity that they had abandoned sin because all the usual vices had
come to seem genteel. When he asked if Gorgondy was a bad wine to
drink I said that it was so bad that if a man sipped it that was the
one touch that made damnation certain. Then he asked me what I had in
the iron bottle, and I said it was Gorgondy; and then he shouted for
the largest tumbler in that ill-lit ancient tavern, and stood up and
shook his fist at me when it came, and swore, and told me to fill it
with the wine that I got on that bitter night from the treasure house
of the gnomes.

As he drank it he told me that he had met men who had spoken against
wine, and that they had mentioned Heaven; and therefore he would not
go there--no, not he; and that once he had sent one of them to Hell,
but when he got there he would turn him out, and he had no use for
milksops.

Over the second tumbler he was thoughtful, but still he said no word
of the tale he knew, until I feared that it would never be heard. But
when the third glass of that terrific wine had burned its way down his
gullet, and vindicated the wickedness of the gnomes, his reticence
withered like a leaf in the fire, and he bellowed out the secret.

I had long known that there is in ships a will or way of their own,
and had even suspected that when sailors die or abandon their ships at
sea, a derelict, being left to her own devices, may seek her own ends;
but I had never dreamed by night, or fancied during the day, that the
ships had a god that they worshipped, or that they secretly slipped
away to a temple in the sea.

Over the fourth glass of the wine that the gnomes so sinfully brew but
have kept so wisely from man, until the bargain that I had with their
elders all through that autumn night,