‘Good morning, Captain Finn.’ He turned and touched his cap. ‘How long is this delicious weather going to last, I wonder? Nothing in sight, eh? Bless us, captain, when are we going to run the “Shark” into view?’ He looked at me with a curious expression which his smile, that was always in the middle of his face, rendered exceedingly odd, and said, ‘Did ye hear anything like a mysterious woice, sir, last night after you’d turned in?’ ‘I was for fancying,’ I answered, ‘that the atmosphere crawled with indistinguishable whispers. But I suppose without imagination there would be no lunatic asylums.’ He said, still preserving his odd look, ‘The sperrit’s discovered, sir.’ ‘Gammon!’ I exclaimed. ‘Ay! we’ve got hold of the woice!’ he cried gleefully. ‘Did ye ever see a ghost, Mr. Monson, sir? Look! _There’s_ the corpse as belonged to the wreck, and _there’s_ the happarition as was a cursing of this yacht last night in the forepeak, and your honour may take it that _there_ is the invisible shape whose hail from off yon quarter has given old Jacob the blues;’ and all the time that he spoke he was pointing to the fore-rigging just under the cross-trees. I had before lightly glanced at a man up there, but had given him no heed whatever, as I supposed him to be a sailor at work. But now I looked again, shading my eyes. ‘Muffin!’ I cried with a gasp of astonishment. ‘Do you mean to say----?’ and I veritably staggered as the full truth and absurdity of the thing rushed upon me. He hung in the rigging facing seawards, and there was turn upon turn of rope round his arms and legs; indeed, he was as snugly secured to the shrouds as if he had been a sample of chafing gear. The sailors had compassionately jammed his hat down on his head, and in the shadow of the brim of it his face looked of the sickly yellow hue of tallow. But he was too high to enable me to witness the expression he wore. He had nothing on but his shirt and a pair of grimy duck trousers rolled to above his knees. ‘What do you think of him as a sperrit, sir?’ cried Finn, with a loud hoarse laugh which caused the sailors at work forward to look up grinning at Muffin, who hung as motionless in the shrouds as if he lay in a faint there. ‘How long has he been seized aloft?’ said I, with something of a pang coming to me out of the sight of him, for there followed close on my first emotion of astonishment a sort of admiration for the outlandish genius of the creature that worked in me like a feeling of pity. ‘Since dawn,’ answered Finn. ‘The men put him where he is. I let ’em have their way. I was afeered they might have used him in an uglier fashion, sir. Jack don’t like to be made a fool of, your honour. Old Jacob, I’m told, felt bloodthirsty. Ye see, ye can’t take a view of them sailors, specially such a chap as Cutbill, and think of ’em as lambs.’