Then I went on deck, and tossed it over. It must have filled before long through its rubber tube, and gone to the bottom. Going back, with a faint hope that I had solved Fred's problem and my own, I found him a raving maniac, screaming and shouting for whiskey. By this time, the skipper and his niece were aroused, and they appeared in the passage between the rooms. Ignoring them for the moment, I endeavored to soothe the demented creature in his berth. To no avail. Springing out, with twitching features and convulsive movements of arms and legs, he upbraided me for throwing overboard the whiskey. I told him that it was all gone, and that I had simply thrown away the _thing_. He would not accept. Shrieking his maledictions upon me, he bounded through the door, reached the deck, and led us in pursuit up the poop steps to the alley. Along this he raced, gained the taffrail, and before the surprised man at the wheel could make a move to stop him, he had sprung overboard. We backed the mainyards, lowered a boat, and searched for two hours before giving him up. He had gone to find the demon that had cursed him--the cylindrical thing of two-feet-and-six-inch dimensions. * * * * * I am an old man now, old and content in the love and companionship of a sweet-faced little woman, who, thanks to the testimony of the German steward, came to me before the end of the passage. Since the death of Fred, I have never dreamed of monsters and cylindrical _things_. But in later years I have studied deeply of psychology and the occult. And these problems remain unsolved. Did I, who dreamed of monsters before Fred was born, obsess him and drive him to the drink that killed him? Or did Fred, after he had begun drinking, obsess me with the dream vision of the _thing_, which found physical manifestation in an innocent fire extinguisher in which he kept the whiskey? THE VOICES The new boy sat, quiet, shy, and abashed, in the seat given him that morning by the principal. His seat mate was a stranger to him, and, being well up in front, right under the desk of the principal, there had been no communication between them. During the morning recess he had made no friends, standing close against the fence that divided the boys from the girls, timidly watching the rough games of the others; and at noon he had run to the new home to which his parents had taken him, with boyish disapproval of the school and the pupils. But now, at three o'clock of this Friday afternoon, he was compelled to change his opinion. The weekly exercises had begun, and, as his last school held no such entertainment, he was intensely interested.