On the Lightship BY Herman Knickerbocker Vielé AUTHOR OF "THE INN OF THE SILVER MOON," "MYRA OF THE PINES," "THE LAST OF THE KNICKERBOCKERS," "HEARTBREAK HILL," ETC. Introduction by THOMAS A. JANVIER [Illustration: Logo] NEW YORK DUFFIELD & COMPANY 1909 COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY DUFFIELD & COMPANY _Published September, 1909_ THE PREMIER PRESS NEW YORK CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION 9 THE STORY OF IGNATIUS, THE ALMONER 19 THE DEAD MAN'S CHEST 41 THE CARHART MYSTERY 83 THE MONSTROSITY 107 THE PRIESTESS OF AMEN RA 135 THE GIRL FROM MERCURY 167 THE UNEXPECTED LETTER 213 THE MONEY METER 233 THE GUEST OF HONOR 263 THE MAN WITHOUT A PENSION 287 INTRODUCTION "On Board the Light-Ship" is the title--retained in loving deference to his intention--that would have been given to this collection of stories by their author. Had Vielé lived but a little while longer, he would have justified it by placing them in a setting characteristically fantastic and characteristically original. He had planned to frame them in an encircling story describing, and duly accounting for, the chance assemblage aboard a vessel of that unusual type of a heterogeneous company; and--having in his own fanciful way convincingly disposed of conditions not precisely in line with the strictest probability--so to dovetail the several stories into their encirclement that the telling of them, in turn, would have come easily and naturally from those upcasts of the sea. It was a project wholly after his own heart. I can imagine the pleasure that he would have found in working his machinery--always out of sight, and always running with a silent smoothness--for getting together in that queer place his company of story-tellers. He would have used, of course, the Light-ship and the light-keepers as his firmly real ground-work. Ship and crew would have been presented in a matter-of-fact way, in keeping with their recognized matter-of-fact existence, that subtly would have instilled the habit of belief into the minds of his readers: and so would have led them onward softly, being in a way hypnotized, to an equal belief--as he slipped lightly along, with seemingly the same simplicity and the same ingenuousness--in what assuredly would not have been matter-of-fact explanations of how those story-tellers happened to be at large upon the ocean before they were taken on board!