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“Hendry Watty! Hendry Watty! pull me in.”

Hendry Watty pulled in hand over fist; and in came the lead sinker over the notch, and still the line was heavy; be pulled and he pulled, and next, all out of the dead waste of the night, came two white hands, like a washerwoman’s, and gripped hold of the stern-board; and on the left of these two hands, on the little finger, was a silver ring, sunk very deep in the flesh. If this was bad, worse was the face that followed–a great white parboiled face, with the hair and whiskers all stuck with chips of wood and seaweed. And if this was bad for anybody, it was worse for my grandfather, who had known Archelaus Rowett before he was drowned out on the Shivering Grounds, six years before.

Archelaus Rowett climbed in over the stern, pulled the hook with the bit of pipe-stem out of his cheek, sat down in the stern-sheets, shook a small crayfish out of his whiskers, and said very coolly–

“If you should come across my wife–“

That was all my grandfather stayed to hear. At the sound of Archelaus’s voice he fetched a yell, jumped clean over the side of the boat and swam for dear life. He swam and swam, till by the bit of the moon he saw the Gull Rock close ahead. There were lashin’s of rats on the Gull Rock, as he knew: but he was a good deal surprised at the way they were behaving: for they sat in a row at the water’s edge and fished, with their tails let down into the sea for fishing-lines: and their eyes were like garnets burning as they looked at my grandfather over their shoulders.

“Hendry Watty! Hendry Watty! You can’t land here–you’re disturbing the pollack.”

“Bejimbers! I wouldn’ do that for the world,” says my grandfather: so off he pushes and swims for the mainland. This was a long job, and ’twas as much as he could do to reach Kibberick beach, where he fell on his face and hands among the stones, and there lay, taking breath.

The breath was hardly back in his body, before he heard footsteps, and along the beach came a woman, and passed close by to him. He lay very quiet, and as she came near he saw ’twas Sarah Rowett, that used to be Archelaus’s wife, but had married another man since. She was knitting as she went by, and did not seem to notice my grandfather: but he heard her say to herself, “The hour is come, and the man is come.”

He had scarcely begun to wonder over this, when he spied a ball of worsted yarn beside him that Sarah had dropped. ‘Twas the ball she was knitting from, and a line of worsted stretched after her along the beach. Hendry Watty picked up the ball and followed the thread on tiptoe. In less than a minute he came near enough to watch what she was doing: and what she did was worth watching. First she gathered wreckwood and straw, and struck flint over touchwood and teened a fire. Then she unravelled her knitting: twisted her end of the yarn between finger and thumb–like a cobbler twisting a wax-end–and cast the end up towards the sky. It made Hendry Watty stare when the thread, instead of falling back to the ground, remained hanging, just as if ’twas fastened to something up above; but it made him stare more when Sarah Rowett began to climb up it, and away up till nothing could be seen of her but her ankles dangling out of the dead waste and middle of the night.

“HENDRY WATTY! HENDRY WATTY!”

It wasn’t Sarah calling, but a voice far away out to sea.

“HENDRY WATTY! HENDRY WATTY! send me a line.”

My grandfather was wondering what to do, when Sarah speaks down very sharp to him, out of the dark: