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“‘A handsome manner of boarding a craft you’ve got, sir,’ said he, glooming at me.

“I was hastening to apologize, but he stopped me coarsely.

“‘Oh, curse the long jaw of him! Fill your cheek with that, you Barbary ape, and wag your tail if you can, but burn your tongue.’

“He pointed to the case-bottle with a forefinger that was like a dirty parsnip. What induced me to swallow the insult, and even some of the pungent liquor of his rude offering? The itch for ‘copy’ was, no doubt, at the bottom of it.

“I sat down opposite my host, filled and drained a bumper. The fire ran to my brain, so that the whole room seemed to pitch and courtesy.

“‘This is an odd fancy of yours,’ I said.

“‘What is?’ said he.

“‘This,’ I answered, waving my hand around–‘this freak of turning a back room into a cabin.’

“He stared at me, and then burst into a malevolent laugh.

“‘Back room, by thunder!’ said he. ‘Why, of course–just a step into the garden where the roses and the buttercupses be agrowing.’

“Now I pricked my ears.

“‘Has the night turned foul?’ I muttered. ‘What a noise the rain makes beating on the window!’

“‘It’s like to be a foul one for you, at least,’ said he. ‘But, as for the rain, it’s blazing moonlight.’

“I turned to the broad casement in astonishment. My God! what did I see? Oh, my friend, my friend! will you believe me? By the melancholy glow that spread therethrough I saw that the whole room was rising and sinking in rhythmical motion; that the lights of King’s Cobb had disappeared, and that in their place was revealed a world of pale and tossing water, the pursuing waves of which leapt and clutched at the glass with innocuous fingers.

“I started to my feet, mad in an instant.

“‘Look, look!’ I shrieked. ‘They follow us–they struggle to get at you, you bloody murderer!’

“They came rising on the crests of the billows; they hurried fast in our wake, tumbling and swaying, their stretched, drowned faces now lifted to the moonlight, now over-washed in the long trenches of water. They were rolled against the galleries of glass, on which their hair slapped like ribbons of seaweed–a score of ghastly white corpses, with strained black eyes and pointed stiff elbows crookt up in vain for air.

“I was mad, but I knew it all now. This was no house, but the good, ill-fated vessel Rayo, once bound for Jamaica, but on the voyage fallen into the hands of the bloody buccaneer, Paul Hardman, and her crew made to walk the plank, and most of her passengers. I knew that the dark scoundrel had boarded and mastered her, and–having first fired and sunk his own sloop–had steered her straight for the Cuban coast, making disposition of what remained of the passengers on the way, and I knew that my great-grandfather had been one of these doomed survivors, and that he had been shot and murdered under orders of the ruffian that now sat before me. All this, as retailed by one who sailed for a season under Hardman to save his skin, is matter of old private history; and of common report was it that the monster buccaneer, after years of successful trading in the ship he had stolen, went into secret and prosperous retirement under an assumed name, and was never heard of more on the high seas. But, it seemed, it was for the great-grandson of one of his victims to play yet a sympathetic part in the grey old tragedy.

“How did this come to me in a moment–or, rather, what was that dream buzzing in my brain of ‘proof’ and ‘copy’ and all the tame stagnation of a long delirium of order? I had nothing in common with the latter. In some telepathic way–influenced by these past-dated surroundings–dropped into the very den of this Procrustes of the seas, I was there to re-enact the fearful scene that had found its climax in the brain of my ancestor.