I made one of the crowd that had assembled to hear the doctor’s report, and stood near the binnacle stand--close enough to it, in fact, to be able to lay my hand upon the hood. My eye was travelling from the ugly patch that had an appearance as of still sifting out upon the white plank within half a yard of me, when I caught sight of a black lump of something just showing in the curve of the base of the binnacle stand betwixt the starboard legs of it. It was gone in a moment with the slipping off it of the streak of moonshine that had disclosed it to me. Almost mechanically, whilst I continued to listen to the doctor, I put my toe to the thing; then, still in a mechanical way, picked it up. It was a large stone, something of the shape of a comb, with a twist in the middle of it, and of a smooth surface on top, but rugged and broken underneath, with a length of about five inches jagged into an edge as keen as a flint splinter. It was extraordinarily heavy, and might in that quality have been a lump of gold. ‘Hallo!’ I cried, ‘what have we here?’ and I held it to the glass of the binnacle to view it by the lamplight. ‘What is that you are looking at, Mr. Dugdale?’ called out old Keeling. ‘Why,’ said I, ‘neither more nor less to my mind than the weapon with which your sailor has been laid low, captain.’ There was a rush to look at it. Keeling held it up to the moonlight, then poised it in his hand. ‘Who could have been the ruffian that hove it?’ he cried. ‘Allow me to see it,’ exclaimed little Mr. Saunders, and he worked his way, low down amongst us, to the captain. He weighed the stone, smelt it, carefully inspected it, then looked up to the captain with a grin that wrinkled his large, long, eager, wise old face from his brow to his chin. ‘A suspicion,’ he exclaimed, ‘that has been slowly growing in my mind is now confirmed. No mortal hand hove this missile, captain. It comes from the angels, sir.’ He paused. ‘Lawk-a-daisy, what is the man going to say next?’ cried out Mrs. Hudson hysterically. ‘Captain Keeling, ladies and gentlemen,’ continued little Saunders, nursing the stone as tenderly while he spoke as if it had been a new-born babe, ‘this has fallen from those infinite spangled heights up there. It is, in short, a meteorolite, and, so far as I can now judge, a very beautiful specimen of one.’ CHAPTER X THE HUMOURS OF AN INDIAMAN The mystery being at an end, most of the passengers, after a brief spell of loitering and talking, went below, little Saunders leading the way with the meteorolite, and the captain closing the procession, to finish the glass of grog; he had been disturbed at by finding the ship off her course. I was exchanging a few words with Mr. Cocker on this second queer incident of the day, when the fellow who was at the wheel exclaimed: ‘Beg pardon, sir;’ and I saw him shift very uneasily from one leg to the other with a drag of the length of his arm over his brow, as though he freely perspired.