But even though he spoke lightly, and seemed very well satisfied to have taken the trade gale in its strength so young, there was the same suggestion of spiritlessness in his manner that had been more or less visible in him now ever since the sailor had told him he had seen his apparition. Though the ghost had not again appeared; though Mr. Owen, with the hope, no doubt, of settling the captain's spirits, had got the seaman to admit that he might have been mistaken, that he was leaning against the forecastle rail in a sort of doze perhaps when he started and saw the thing, which, he avowed, might very well have been an illusion of shadow and moonlight upon his sleepy vision--it was all one; a weight of dejection had come upon the captain's mind, and ever since the night of superstition he had ceased to be that merry, arch, humorous Irishman who had called upon my father, and made us laugh almost in the very anguish of my leave-taking. This was so noticeable in him whilst he talked to me about the south-east trade wind, and going for Cape Horn in a bee-line, and our first sunny port--full of quaint costumes and pleasant fruit and queer merry-makings--just round the corner, that on returning to the cabin sometime afterwards and finding Mrs. Burke there sewing, I sat down beside her and talked about him. 'What should there be in this thing, nurse, to dispirit your husband after all these days, now that the man has as good as sworn that he was mistaken?' 'Why, my dear, he is an Irishman, and they are a superstitious people.' 'The crew no longer trouble themselves about that ghost.' 'I don't think they do. The boatswain,' said she, laughing, 'told my husband a man had said that as the ghost appeared with a wet face it must have been Old Stormy.' 'Who's Old Stormy?' said I. 'Oh,' she answered, still laughing, 'there is a well-known windlass song called "Old Stormy, he is dead and gone!"' 'Old Stormy wouldn't be like Captain Burke,' said I. 'And that should satisfy him,' she answered. 'I doubt that he's quite the thing. These roasting latitudes use the liver cruelly. Then again there's the anxiety of command. The tone of the mind gets lowered by worry, which a man takes as a matter of routine, and doesn't heed though it's working in him all the same. It'll wear off, I dare say, when the weather gets cold.' She talked placidly, going on with her work with a comfortable, smiling face. She had married too late in life to take anxious views of her husband. It's the young wife that frets, I think. Not that Mrs. Burke would not have shown herself deeply anxious had her husband been ailing in his health; it was his fancies she took no notice of, a smile was good enough for them.