“They—the rats, of course—were a strange, heathenish set, and no respecters of persons, but first chased the cat on shore, and then made a hurra’s nest of the cabin—polishing their long whiskers with spermaceti—planning surprise-parties in the pantry—running to’gallant races over your nose in the sleeping-berths, and gauging every hollow vessel in the ship, with tails a fathom long, from the oil-casks and the scuttle-butt down to the pickle-jars and the captain’s barrel of New England. They were a sleek, long-bodied race, as black as imps of darkness, and as fearless as if they possessed as many reputed lives as grimalkin herself. I was weary of watching their capers, and of the sound of Catherton’s tread, expecting him every moment to call me up; when turning in my berth, I noticed that the after-cabin door was standing open. While I was wondering at this, a feeling of awe stole over me, thinking of the conversation I had overheard among the men the night before, and that very moment, as I was looking intently at the spot, a figure in white passed swiftly and silently out of the store-room into the cabin, closing the door behind it. I would afterward have given worlds to have been able to pursue it, but could not, for the power to move a limb was dead for the time being, and I lay still staring after it, with mouth agape and the cold drops on my forehead, palsied, as it would seem, by that sort of instinctive abhorrence with which humanity revolts against a disembodied spirit that has assumed, for some mysterious end, the form and garniture of its house of clay. It was a woman’s shape—the head bare, and the long dark hair hanging down to the waist, and, before the door closed, the light for an instant flickered on the face, ghastly and white—as the man-of-war’s man had said—with the mouth closed and the lips drawn tightly in. Its back was toward my berth, until it turned into the after-cabin, and it seemed to me that it had something clutched in its hand; but the hollow look of the sunken eyes froze my very heart’s blood, as they glared back at the lamp, from behind the bloodless and bony cheek. I was first roused from my trance by the sound of some one coming down the companion-way, and it was not until Catherton had thrice called me, laying his hand upon my shoulder, the third time, that I started at last to my feet, when he must have noticed my looks, as I still stared past him at the cabin-door. “‘It wants but a few moments of the time, Mr. Miller,’ was all he said, and if I had died for it, I could not have answered, but huddling on my clothes in silence, mechanically followed him on deck. All was there as still as death. The moon had not yet risen, and you heard the sound of the ebb plashing against the Tartar’s bows, and rippling and gurgling in the eddies astern, as it swept through the strait.