peak, rolling through the bushes like a sea-cow, to report his not having seen anything, and to say they'd forgot to relieve him aloft; so rousing up Jacobs, I sent them both back together, while Jones and I held the opposite way for the other height. The moment we got to it, _there_ was the same faint blotted-out horizon as we had had all astern of us the night before, the same strange unnatural paleness cast off the face of the sea, making it look black by contrast to north-eastward and east, against the blue shadow with the bright stars in it, where the sea rippled as usual; while the keenest glare in the middle seemed to stream right to the breast of the island, like the reflection of daylight down a long break in the ice--only it was dead and ghastly to behold. The white water washed round under the black edge of the rocks before us, to the bare sloping beach, where it came up fairly like a wide plash of milk, glimmering and sparkling back amongst the little sea-creatures you fancied you saw moving and crawling out or in; till it ran along by where the reefs were, and turned off to the dim sky again. Everything else was still, and Jones drew a breath like one relieved. "Nothing after all, I think, sir!" said he: but to my mind there was something a long sight more awful in the look of that unaccountable white water bearing down like snow upon the island, as it were, with the wrinkles and eddies to be seen faintly in it here and there back toward the glaring breadth of it, and the floating streaks in the sky above. Especially when he told me he thought it was owing to millions upon millions of living things in it, that made the same show there at two different seasons in the year, for a week or so at a time--the appearance of it getting less distinct every night. However, I had begun to grow uneasy again about the Indiaman, and the schooner too, as well as doubtful of the fellows coming to the island it all; on the contrary, as I said to Jones, if they saw the schooner, and Westwood didn't manage as I told him, why both she, the ship, and ourselves might possibly get the finishing-stroke altogether. "The more I think of it," said I, "the more cursedly foolish it seems to be here instead of aboard!" "Why it is, Mr Collins, I don't know," replied Jones, "yet I feel as sure these men will land here as if I heard them in the woods: and if I wasn't aware how one crime breeds another, for my part I shouldn't be here at present, sir. Many a night afloat has the thought of this place weighed on me, lest there was something new doing in it: but what's buried here I'm resolved no man shall stir up, if I can help it, sir!" A little after, as we got up and went down to the beach, all of a sudden--like a thing he couldn't avoid--Jones began to give me some snatches of what had happened here some years before, which, according to him, he had got from a shipmate of his that died; and I must say it made the blood creep in me to listen to it.