It was one evening while we were chugging peacefully across the Caribbean Sea that occurred the first of the remarkable incidents which made this voyage so memorable to me. I remember the setting of it perfectly. We were all in the saloon; I suppose because the night was for some reason unpleasant. The weather was calm, at any rate. Geoffrey and I were reading. Old Vandermeulen and his wife were playing cribbage. Pauline was sitting at a writing-table fixed in a corner of the saloon, entering up the day’s trivial happenings in the diary which she religiously kept. I remember glancing at her and noticing that she was chewing the nail of her left thumb--a habit of which I was vainly trying to break her--as she stared vacantly at the bulkhead, no doubt ransacking her memory for some incident to record. Suddenly she turned round upon us with a startled cry. “Look, Mamma!--I have scrawled all over my diary without knowing that I did it!--Isn’t that strange!” We all of us looked up languidly. The mother made some banal remark, but did not withdraw her attention from her cards. The father glanced affectionately toward her without ceasing to count up the score he was about to peg on the board. Geoffrey and I continued our reading. But the girl had been puzzling over the scrawl and all at once she jumped up from her seat and came across to us. “Look!” she said. “Isn’t it funny? These words--they’re all like the words on blotting-paper--they go backwards and inside out! And there are figures, too!--Whatever could have made me do it?--And I don’t remember doing it either, though of course I must have done so. There was nothing on that page a minute before, I am sure of that!” There was something curiously uneasy in the girl’s manner, a note in her voice that impressed me. I got up, took the open diary from her hand and there sure enough was a large uneven scrawl, two lines of it, diagonally across the page, and, as she said, reversed, as though it had been blotted down upon it. Almost without thinking, I held the open page against one of the mirrors panelled in the saloon wall--and I could not repress a cry of astonishment. The scrawl was a decipherable sentence, mysterious enough, but coherent!--I’ll write it down for you as nearly as I remember it, so as to show you how it looked. He produced pencil and paper from his pocket, wrote: “_lucia 1324 N 8127 W katalina sculle point SWbS 3 trees digge jno dawson youre turne_:” There you are--the last two words were added like a postscript and were followed by a rough sketch, an irregular oval over a St. Andrew’s cross, like this--O/X I read out what was written, and Pauline stared at me wide-eyed. “Whatever could have made me write that?” she exclaimed. Geoffrey looked up, fraternally scornful.