The bearer further said, that he was ordered to leave a small blue and yellow flag, that we were to hoist, if we fell in with the Waterwraith, a schooner-tender that he had cruising about the island, which would prevent her from molesting us. "Murder! Are there three of them?--ho, ho, hoo,"--trundled out our friend, Toby Tooraloo. When we tried to get the carpenter's crew to take payment as they were leaving us, they said they were positively forbidden to do so, and their captain _was not a man to be trifled with_. "Why, so it appears," thought I. Lennox was mute and melancholy, but we could not better ourselves, so at length we retired to rest. I could not sleep, however, so I was soon on deck again, where I found both Lennox and Tooraloo before me. And now it was that a most striking and inexplicable incident occurred. The voice of the wilderness, every traveller knows, is many-toned and various; and how often have not mysterious sounds broken on the ear of the solitary look-out man, in the middle watch, for which he never could account? On the midnight tossing of the melancholy main, who has not fancied a "voice articulate" in the hoarse murmur, and often wolf-like howl, of the approaching wave? But listen! "Do you hear that, sir?" said Lennox to me, so soon as I came on deck. I listened, and heard a low moaning noise that came off the land, swelling and dying away on the fitful gusts of the _terral_, like the deepest tones of an Eolian harp. It sank and sank, and was just melting away, and becoming inaudible altogether, when it seemed to blend into a ponderous and solemn sound, that floated down to us on the fitful breeze, like the midnight tolling of a deep-toned cathedral bell, or the gradually increasing tremulous boom of a large gong. "I do," said I; "and hark--is that a bell?--no, it cannot be, yet the sound is most like." Again we all listened eagerly. But the sound had ceased, and we were about commencing our pendulum walk on the confined deck, when once more it came off, and in the very strongest of the swell, the same ringing sound swung three times over us distinctly on the night air. "Who struck the bell there?" I sung out, a good deal startled--no answer--we all then passed forward; _there was no one on deck_--"very strange," said I--"what can it be?" "My dregy,"[1] said poor Lennox, with a faint laugh. [1] _Anglice_, dirge. "Davy Jones--Davy Jones--the devil--the devil--the devil--hooro, hooro, hooro!" quoth Tooraloo. Whatever it was we heard neither sound again, but they had scarcely ceased when a small glow-worm coloured spark, precisely like the luminous appearance of a piece of decayed fish, flitted about the foretopgallant yard and royal-masthead, now on the truck, now on either yardarm, like a bee on the wing, during the time one might count twenty, and then vanished.