_Now_, knowing sailors as I do, I can read those seamen's faces by the aid of memory, and almost tell their thoughts as they stood there near the gangway. 'Well, poor Bill, there he lies.'--'My turn next perhaps.'--'What's that yarn the skipper's a-reading? A blooming good job for them it's true of! No call to talk of _souls_ at sea. It's work hard, live hard, and die hard here; and what's arterwards there's Bill there to say.' At a signal the flag was withdrawn, the stitched hammock was revealed, the plank was tilted, and the grim parcel despatched. The night that followed was breathless and beautiful. In the south-east under the moon the water stretched in a stainless field of light, flashing, but still as a sheet of looking-glass; our sails glowed blandly like starlight itself as they rose one above another into the whitened gloom in whose clear profound many meteors were darting, leaving a smoke of spangles for all the world like sky-rockets under the large trembling stars. Lovely _they_ were: but for the moon I think many had studded the water with points of light, to ride and widen upon the black and noiseless lift of swell, thick and sluggish as though it were oil that ran, and scarcely putting three moons'-breadth of motion into our mastheads, though it sweetened the air with the rain of dew it softly beat out of the canvas. The cabin was too hot to sit in. There was no magic in two windsails and a wide skylight to cool it. I had played at cribbage with Mrs. Burke till, with a yawn, the hour being about half-past nine, I proposed that we should go on deck. The steward followed us with a tray of refreshments; the captain and Mr. Owen joined us, pipes in mouth, and we sat, nothing betwixt us and the stars but the moonlit shadow of the night through which we saw them. Four bells were struck, ten o'clock; there was no light forward saving a little sheen of the forecastle lamp round about the fore-scuttle, like a dim luminous mist there. But the moon lay bright upon the white planks of the deck, and though the rigging rose pale as tarnished silver to the mastheads it made a network of shadows black as ebony, which swung with the roll of the ship as though they kept time to music. I was looking at some of this delicate network on the main deck when the figure of a man passed through it and approached the boatswain, who had charge of the ship till midnight. They talked with a rumble in their notes that was as good as telling you something was wrong. The captain called out: 'What does that man want?' The boatswain then came to us, leaving the man standing, and exclaimed, 'He says there's a strange sailor in the ship.' 'What's that?' demanded Captain Burke. 'He says there's a man walking about as don't belong to the ship's company.' 'Whose grog has he been cribbing?' said Mr. Owen.