coloured crew, that it was impossible to tell where a man might be lying listening and hidden. Twice I beheld the flitting of a shadow in the obscurity round about the mainmast, and all the while I walked I was again and again casting a look behind me.

It seemed an eternity ere the cold gray of the dawn hovered in the east. The first sight the bleak and desolate light revealed was a patch of dark crimson abreast of the companion, close against the rail, marking the spot where the unhappy mate had been stabbed. The barque stole glimmering out to the daylight, lifting her ashen canvas with a gloom about the deck where the forecastle ended, as though the blackness of the night had been something tangible, and the lingering shadows betwixt the rails fragments and tatters of it. I swept the sea-line. The ocean was a gray desert floating in thin lines of swell which made it resemble a vast carpet stirred by a draught of wind. But the small breeze of the previous evening was still with us, and the broad bows of the vessel broke the water into wrinkles fine-drawn as piano-wire, as she swam forwards, slowly rolling.

Three of the crew sat squatting like Lascars against the long-boat. I called, and they instantly sprang to their feet and came aft.

'Get scrapers,' said I, 'and work that stain out of the deck as fast as you can move your arms.'

They sprang forwards, returned with the necessary tools, and in a minute were on their knees scraping violently. With a dreadful feeling of sickness of heart I rejoined Helga at the other end of the deck.

The sun rose: the morning was to be a bright one; the heavens went, in a clear tropic blue, into the south and west, and in the north-east the clouds, like a scattering of frosted silver, hung high and motionless—mere pearly feathers or vapour, to be presently absorbed. Helga went below, to her cabin under the deck. When I asked her if she did not feel timid at the idea of penetrating those gloomy depths alone, she smiled, and, merely saying, 'You have called me brave, but you do not believe me so!' she left me.

It was shortly after seven o'clock that I spied Nakier standing in the galley-door, talking to someone within. I called to him: he immediately knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and slipping the inch of sooty clay into his breast, approached me. His salute was full of respect, and he surveyed me with eyes so gentle and so cordial, that one looked to see the engaging tenderness of his heart overflowing his face in smiles. So much for 

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