The men who scrambled over the side were Friend and Meehan. We stood gazing and listening. The foresail occasionally flapped as the little vessel heaved to the swell, but the water washed along the bends noiseless as quicksilver. Saving the wreckage forward, I could see nothing wrong with the schooner. There were signs of confusion, as though she had been abandoned in a hurry: the sails had come down with a run, and lay unfurled; the decks were littered with ropes’ ends. But all deck fixtures were in their place; nay, there was even a small boat chocked under the starboard gangway forward, but the bigger boat, which such a craft as this would carry, was missing. My eye went to the skylight, and I started. It was oblong. “What more of the dream remains to be verified?” thought I. The skylight was closed, the frames secured within, the glass filthy. I peered and peered to no purpose. On this I stepped to the companion, while the two seamen moved forward to look down the hatches in obedience to my orders; but I paused when I was in the companion way. I seemed to smell a damp odor as of a vault. “Good God!” thought I, “if there _should_ be anything horrible at the head of the table, with a pack of---- Chut! ye fool!” I said to myself, “say a prayer and shove on, and be hanged to you!” and down I went. Well, there was no skeleton; there was nothing horrible to be seen. If the grim Feature had ever occupied the head of that table, he had found a companion; he had played his trump card: he had won of a surety, and he and his opponent were gone. But had I veritably beheld a living skeleton seated at the table and motioning as though it would deal, I could not have been more scared--no; let me say I could not have been more impressed than I was--by the sight of the furniture. of the cabin. It was precisely as Greaves had described it. It was the plainest sea interior in the world--nothing whatever worth looking at, nothing in it to detain the attention for an instant; yet it was all exactly as Greaves described it. I was revisited by the misgiving of an earlier hour. “The man is an extraordinary dreamer,” I said to myself. “He may be a little mad. A few people dream as this man has dreamt, and those few, I suspect, will be found somewhat mad at root. Has he dreamt of the ship in the island cave? Did he, that he might justify to _himself_ his faith in his extraordinary vision by sailing on this quest--did he _forge_ that manifest which, backed by his eloquent advocacy, no doubt, induced old Bartholomew Tulp to put his hand in his pocket?” I stood thus thinking when I heard my name called. “Hallo!” I exclaimed. “There’s somebody alive forrad!” cried one of the men. I ran on deck. “What is it?” “This way, sir,” shouted Meehan. I followed the fellow to the forecastle--that is to say, to the hatch by which the forecastle was entered and quitted. “There’s somebody knocking,” cried Friend. “Thump back and sing out,” I cried.