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I had to confess that here was a fact I had not before known.

“I ran up the river,” said the Hollander, “to have a game of bowls with the Englishman and his crew, nearly all of them countrymen of mine; and, by-the-way, Hudson always insists that it was I who brought the storm with me that gave poor Rip Van Winkle the rheumatism as he slept off his intoxication on the hillside under the pines. He was a good fellow, Rip, and a very good judge of schnapps, too.”

Seeing him smile with the pleasant memories of past companionship, I marvelled when the sorrowful expression swiftly covered his face again as a mask.

“But why talk of those who are dead and gone and are happy?” he asked in his deep voice. “Soon there will be no one left, perhaps, but Ahasuerus and Vanderdecken–the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman.”

He sighed bitterly, and then he gave a short, hard laugh.

“There’s no use talking about these things, is there?” he cried. “In an hour or two, if the wind holds, I can show you the house in which Ahasuerus has established his museum, the only solace of his lonely life. He has the most extraordinary gathering of curiosities the world has ever seen–truly a virtuoso’s collection. An American reporter came on a voyage with me fifty or sixty years ago, and I took him over there. His name was Hawthorne. He interviewed the Jew, and wrote up the collection in the American papers, so I’ve been told.”

“I remember reading the interview,” I said, “and it was indeed a most remarkable collection.”

“It’s all the more curious now for the odds and ends I’ve been able to pick up here and there for my old friend,” Vanderdecken declared; “I got him the horn of Hernani, the harpoon with which Long Tom Coffin pinned the British officer to the mast, the long rifle of Natty Bumppo, the letter A in scarlet cloth embroidered in gold by Hester Prynne, the banner with the strange device ‘Excelsior,’ the gold bug which was once used as a plummet, Maud Muller’s rake, and the jack-knives of Hosea Biglow and Sam Lawson.”

“You must have seen extraordinary things yourself,” I ventured to suggest.

“No man has seen stranger,” he answered, promptly. “No man has ever been witness to more marvellous deeds than I–not even Ahasuerus, I verily believe, for he has only the land, and I have the boundless sea. I survey mankind from China to Peru. I have heard the horns of elfland blowing, and I could tell you the song the sirens sang. I have dropped anchor at the No Man’s Land, and off Lyonesse, and in Xanadu, where Alph the sacred river ran. I have sailed from the still-vexed Bermoothes to the New Atlantis, of which there is no mention even until the year 1629.”

“In which year there was published an account of it written in the Latin tongue, but by an Englishman,” I said, desirous to reveal my acquirements.

“I have seen every strange coast,” continued the Flying Dutchman. “The Island of Bells and Robinson Crusoe’s Island and the Kingdoms of Brobdingnag and Lilliput. But it is not for me to vaunt myself for my voyages. And of a truth there are men I should like to have met and talked with whom I have yet failed to see. Especially is there one Ulysses, a sailor-man of antiquity who called himself Outis, whence I have sometimes suspected that he came from the town of Weissnichtwo.”

Just to discover what Vanderdecken would say, I inquired innocently whether this was the same person as one Captain Nemo of whose submarine exploits I had read.

“Captain Nemo?” the Flying Dutchman repeated scornfully. “I never heard of him. Are you sure there is such a fellow?”

I tried to turn the conversation by asking if he had ever met another ancient mariner named Charon.

“Oh, yes,” was his answer. “Charon keeps the ferry across the Styx to the Elysian Fields, past the sunless marsh of Acheron. Yes–I’ve met him more than once. I met him only last month, and he was very proud of his new electric launch with its storage battery.”