tulated each other on the torture of two saints:
one saint was roasting on a grid-iron; the other, hung up to a tree by
his heels, had been just skinned, and was not quite dead yet. Feeling
no great desire, after these specimens, to look at any more of the
illustrated Passions, I turned to the opposite wall to be instructed in
the career of the Wandering Jew. Here a second inscription informed me
that the painter considered the Flying Dutchman to be no other than
the Wandering Jew, pursuing his interminable Journey by sea. The marine
adventures of this mysterious personage were the adventures chosen for
representation by Dexter's brush. The first picture showed me a harbor
on a rocky coast. A vessel was at anchor, with the helmsman singing on
the deck. The sea in the offing was black and rolling; thunder-clouds
lay low on the horizon, split by broad flashes of lightning. In the
glare of the lightning, heaving and pitching, appeared the misty form
of the Phantom Ship approaching the shore. In this work, badly as it was
painted, there were really signs of a powerful imagination, and even
of a poetical feeling for the supernatural. The next picture showed the
Phantom Ship, moored (to the horror and astonishment of the helmsman)
behind the earthly vessel in the harbor. The Jew had stepped on shore.
His boat was on the beach. His crew--little men with stony, white faces,
dressed in funeral black--sat in silent rows on the seats of the boat,
with their oars in their lean, long hands. The Jew, also a black, stood
with his eyes and hands raised imploringly to the thunderous heaven.
The wild creatures of land and sea--the tiger, the rhinoceros, the
crocodile, the sea-serpent, the shark, and the devil-fish--surrounded
the accursed Wanderer in a mystic circle, daunted and fascinated at the
sight of him. The lightning was gone. The sky and sea had darkened to
a great black blank. A faint and lurid light lighted the scene, falling
downward from a torch, brandished by an avenging Spirit that hovered
over the Jew on outspread vulture wings. Wild as the picture might be
in its conception, there was a suggestive power in it which I confess
strongly impressed me. The mysterious silence in the house, and my
strange position at the moment, no doubt had their effect on my mind.
While I was still looking at the ghastly composition before me, the
shrill trilling sound of the whistle upstairs burst on the stillness.
For the moment my nerves were