linen flying
on the lines. "This wind's playing hell with my curls," said one or two.
The matter with me was, that my room was almost untenable. I opened the
port at my peril; to do so was to entertain billows of coal-dust from the
bunkers below. White paint, the order of the day, whether flat white or
white enamel, made progress about the ship by an amateur dangerous, too.

The apparition of the steward under the evening lamps dressed in a
smock--he was of ample make--and brandishing a paint-brush, was generally
enjoyed. In fact, several spectators came to take a careful look at
one who was too often denominated "the mouldy-headed old b----."

A more tenuous apparition was heard of, as we ran north. Whether a hoax
or not, I do not know. My first information of it came in the form of
a drawing by the apprentice Tich, showing the ship's bell being struck by
a hand who never was on land or sea, and the apprentice Lamb leaving
his hold of the wheel in horror, and even Mead shaking all over and
gaping. A poem appended said that the facts were what the picture made
out. The _Bonadventure_ was so new a ship--her old name, showing her war
origin, still stood on the bells and the blue prints in the chart-room and
elsewhere--that there seemed every likelihood against the story being
the truth. I asked Mead, and he told me what he maintained to be true.

On the first watch, the voyage before this, he had gone into the
wheel-house for a word with the apprentice at the wheel. A shadow,
indistinct, yet leaving impressed on his recollection a human shape,
slipped suddenly past the wheel-house windows, softly rang the bell
once, and swiftly departed. The frightened boy drops the wheel, lets
the ship swing round completely out of her course: Mead runs out, but
there is nothing to be seen. He sends for the two A.B.'s who might
have come up on the bridge, but they say that they have not done so,
nor indeed would they come without object. The firemen, if they have to
communicate with the bridge, never come higher than the stairway to the
bridge deck, and it proved that no one of them had been there. By the
wheel-house clock, it was noticed that the precise time of the visitation
was 10.15, an hour not hitherto regarded by ghosts, I believe, as
preferable to midnight.

And more. Still imagining that some practical joker was at work, Mead
brought a big stick with him on his watch. This was no remedy. The ghost
appeared again, at much the