"I found her house from the address she had given me, and walked once or twice up and down to consider all I should say to her. It was any way a difficult thing and one I did not like doing, having to relate the death of her husband; and besides, women are inclined to think there is always some neglect in others if an accident happens to those they love. At last I plucked up courage and knocked at the door. A decent-looking servant came, and upon my asking if Mrs Wharton were at home, she replied, `Mrs Wharton don't live here. Mrs Somebody or other lives here, and she ain't at home.' I asked if she could tell me where, to find Mrs Wharton, and was informed by the maid that she was a stranger and knew nothing; but the baker over the way, she thought, could tell me. I went over and asked the baker's wife, and she informed me that Mrs Wharton had been dead nearly five months, and her aunt had moved away. I was thunderstruck at this intelligence, and immediately inquired the date of her death; she looked over a daybook in the drawer, and told me. I put it down in my memorandum-book, and when I got back to the ship I found the date the same as that noted on the leaf of the log-book as the one that the captain had seen her off the Cape. Now, I never was superstitious before this, nor am I alarmed now at the idea of seeing ghosts, but still there is a queer sort of feeling comes over me when I think of that night. "When I got home to my friends, I told the clergyman and the doctor what had been seen. The first explained it to me as an optical delusion, but acknowledged that it was very curious; the other looked into my eyes as though he were trying to see some signs of insanity, and told me it was very likely that the captain's supper had disagreed with him that night, or that he was half-seas-over. "Now, I haven't much learning myself, but I do despise what I have seen called science; men who study books only, can't know so much as those who see the real things; I haven't patience with men who, never having travelled much, or been across the oceans, quietly tell the world that what a hundred sane men's experienced eyes have seen and known as a sea-serpent is discovered by their scientific reasoning to be a bundle of seaweed, or a shoal of porpoises, because they saw once at Brighton one or the other, when even a land-lubber could hardly have been mistaken. My wise doctor tried to prove that what the skipper had seen with his own eyes was nothing but the result of a supper he hadn't eaten, or the fumes of some grog that weren't swallowed; because it happened not to be accounted for in his fusty old books in any other way--I would sooner be without science, if this is the result.