There was velvety softness in his dark eyes, and gentleness in his flexible mouth, and yet the least observant person speaking with him could see that fire was ready to leap out of those soft eyes on provocation, and that the mouth could set with rigid determination when his prejudices were touched. The forehead of the man was of unusual height. He had become partly bald, had shed some of the hair above the brow, and this had given loftiness to his forehead. There were hollows between his temples and eye-brows; his head was lumpy and narrow. Altogether it was an ill-balanced, but an interesting head. The mystic, who at one time was a prominent feature in religious life, has almost disappeared from among us, gone utterly out of the cultured classes, gone from among the practical mercantile classes, going little by little from the lower beds of life, not expelled by education but by the materialism that penetrates every realm of human existence. In time the mystic will have become as extinct as the dodo, the great auk, and the Caleb Balderstones. But there are mystics still—especially where there is a strain of Celtic blood, and of this class of beings was Stephen Saltren. The captain was in trouble, and whenever he was in trouble or unhappy he had recourse to prayer, and he prayed with most disengagement on his raft. He came to the quarry when his mind was disturbed and his heart agitated, thrust himself out from land, and prayed where he believed himself to be unobserved and unlikely to be interrupted.