‘Him they’ve nicknamed the mute,’ said he. ‘What, Muffin?’ ‘Ay! sounds as if he’d swallowed his sister and she was calling out to be released.’ There happened inside this particular week with which I am dealing an incident much too curious not to deserve a place here. All day long it had been blowing a fresh breeze from north-east, but as the sun sank the wind went with him, and about an hour before sunset there was a mild air breathing with scarce weight enough in it to blow the scent off a milkmaid, as sailors say, though it was giving the yacht way as you saw by the creep of the wrinkles at her stem working out from the shadow of the yacht’s form in the water into lines that resembled burnished copper wire in the red western light. Miss Laura and Wilfrid were on deck, and I was leaning over the rail with a pipe in my mouth, all sorts of easy, dreamy fancies slipping into me out of the drowsy passage of the water alongside with its wreath of foam bells eddying or some little cloudy seething of white striking from our wet and flashing side into a surface which hung so glass-like with the crimson tinge in the atmosphere sifting down into it that you fancied you could see a hundred fathoms deep. Presently running my eyes ahead I caught sight of some minute object three or four points away on the weather bow, which every now and again would sparkle like the leap of a flame from the barrel of a musket. I stepped to the companion, picked up the telescope and made the thing out to be a bottle, the glass of which gave back the sunlight in fitful winkings to the twists and turns of it upon the ripples. ‘What are you looking at?’ cried Wilfrid. ‘A bottle,’ I answered. ‘Ho!’ he laughed, ‘what you sailors call a dead marine, ha? What sort of liquor will it have contained, I wonder, and how long has it been overboard?’ The glass I held was Captain Finn’s; it was a very powerful instrument, and the bottle came so close to me in the lenses that it was like examining it at arm’s length. ‘It is corked,’ said I. ‘Can we not pick it up?’ exclaimed Miss Jennings. ‘Oh, but an empty bottle, my dear,’ exclaimed Wilfrid, with a shrug. I examined it again. ‘I tell you what, Wilfrid; that it is corked should signify there is something in it. Who troubles himself to plug an empty bottle when it is flung overboard unless it is intended as a messenger?’ He was instantly excited. ‘Why, by all means then----,’ he broke off, looking round. The mate had charge; he was sulkily pacing the deck to leeward with a lift of his askew eye aloft and then a stare over the rail, all as regular as the recurrence of rhymes in poetry. ‘Mr. Crimp,’ called Wilfrid. The man came over to us. ‘Do you see that bottle?’ Crimp shaded his eyes and took a steady view of the water towards which my cousin pointed, and then said, ‘Is that there thing flashing a bottle?’ ‘Yes, man; yes.’ ‘Well, I see it right enough.’ ‘Get it picked up, Mr. Crimp,’ said Wilfrid.