I could
hear the man breathing as he seemed to pause after bringing the
hatchway to its bearings over his head. I did not suppose that the
captain ever entered this part of the ship. The man, for all I could
conjecture, might be one of the mates, or the boatswain, or the head
steward, visiting the lazarette on some errand of duty, and coming down
very quietly that the passengers who slept in the cabins on either hand
the corridor should not be disturbed. Accordingly, I shrank into the
compactest posture I could contort myself into, and watched.

A lucifer match was struck; the flame threw out the figure of a man
standing on the cargo just under the hatch; he pulled out a little
bull's-eye lamp from his pocket and lighted it, and carefully
extinguished the match. The long, misty beam of the magnified flame
swept the interior like the revolving spoke of a wheel as the man
slowly turned the lens about in a critical search of the place, himself
being in blackness. The line of light broke on the casks behind which
I crouched, and left me in deep shadow unperceived. After some minutes
of this sort of examination, the man, came a little way forward and
crouched down upon a bale or something of the sort directly abreast of
the casks, through whose cant-lines I was peering. He opened the lamp
and placed it beside him; the light was then full upon his figure.

He might have been an officer of the ship for all I knew. His dress
was not distinguishable, but I had his face very plain in my sight. He
was extremely pale; his nose was long and aquiline; he wore moustaches,
whiskers, and a short beard, black, but well streaked with grey. His
eyebrows were bushy and dark; his eyes were black, and the reflected
lamplight shot in gleams from them, like to that level spoke of
radiance with which he had swept this lazarette. His hair was
unusually long, even for that age of the fashion, and his being without
a hat made me guess he was not from the deck, though I never doubted
that he was one of the ship's company.

When he opened the bull's-eye lamp and put it down, he drew something
out of his pocket which glittered in his hand. I strained my sight,
yet should not have managed to make out what he grasped but for his
holding it close to the light; I then saw that it was a small circular
brass box; a kind of little metal cylinder, from whose side fell a
length of black line, just as tape draws out of a yard measure. He
talked