the stern for hours, and with folded arms watch the rolling hulk ploughing her way slowly in the long streak of foam left by our propeller. He still wore his faded velvet breeches, but his bare legs were now covered by a pair of woollen stockings, while in place of his ragged doublet he wore an old pea-jacket, and sometimes an oilskin coat and peaked cap. He still, however, clung to the rusty sword which he had chosen, a blunt but finely-tempered weapon, and often it would be seen poking from beneath his oilskin as he walked the deck.

Once an attempt had been made to trim his long white hair and flowing beard, but this he had resented so vigorously, threatening to spit the man who held the scissors, that the effort had to be abandoned. He thus gave them to understand that although he might accept their modern dress as a loan he would brook no interference with his personal appearance.

Who was he? That was the question which all of us, from Job Seal down to the apprentices, were anxious to solve.

The mystery of the Seahorse was great enough, but that surrounding the unknown man was greater. My own theory regarding the vessel was that in the early seventeenth century she had gone down or aground in shallow water, perhaps in one of the many coves on the Moroccan or Algerian coast, but the high prow and stern being closed down so tight both air and water were excluded. Those on board—fighting men, it seemed—had perished, but the buoyancy of the ship had been preserved, and by some submarine disturbance—volcanic, most probably—it had become released and risen to the surface.

Seahorse

The growth of barnacles, mussels, and weeds over the whole of the vessel from the stumps of her masts caused Seal to believe that she could only have been covered at high tide, and that she must have lain hidden in some well-sheltered spot where the force of the waves had been broken, otherwise she must have been beaten to pieces. He pointed out to me how some of the weed on her was only to be found on rocks covered at high water, yet if the theory were a correct one then she could not have been hidden in the Mediterranean, as it is an almost tideless sea.

Seal suggested that she might have been aground on the coast of Western Morocco, a country but little known to the civilized world although so near one of the greatest trade routes, and that she might have drifted from the Atlantic to the spot where we had discovered her.

This theory 

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