A couple of seamen caught hold of the grating and raised it level with the bulwarks, one end supported by the rail. The body was placed upon it, and ghostly it looked in that spectral commingling of starlight and lamplight and moonlight not yet brightening out of its redness--ghastly in the nakedness of its canvas cover, though, to be sure, there was no need at that hour to conceal it under a flag. Finn pulled a thin volume from his pocket and opened it close against one of the lanterns, peering into it hard and coughing hoarsely as though loath to begin. At last he mustered up courage and made a start. He pronounced many of the words oddly, and there was a deep sea-note in his delivery. I watched his long face twitching and working to his recital as he brought his eyes in a squint to the page with the lantern-light touching his skin into a hue of sulphur that made one think of it as the likeness of a human countenance wrought in yellow silk upon black satin. But the mystery of death was with us; it seemed to breathe--hot as the night was--in an ice-cold air off the dark surface of the sea, and a man’s sense of humour must have been of the featherweight quality of an idiot’s to flutter in the presence of the pallid, motionless bundle upon the grating, whose chill, secret subduing inspirations were unspeakably heightened by the eyes of the sailors round about gleaming out of the weak glimmer of their countenances vaguely shaped by the rays of the oil-flames upon the obscurity, by the silver gaze of the countless equinoctial heaven surveying us over the yardarms and through the squares of the ratlines and amid the exquisite tracery of the gear, and by the steadfast watching of stars low down in the measureless dark distances of the west and north and south, as though they were the eyes of giant spirits standing on tiptoe behind the horizon to observe us, and by the slow soaring of the moon that was now icing her crimson visage with crystal, and diffusing a soft cloud of white light over the eastern sky with an edging already of brilliant glory under her upon a short length of the dark sea-line there that made the water in that direction look as though its boundary were beating in ivory foam against the wall of sky.