"More--more--than the plate-ship--this is a treasure house--" and then, suddenly, he stopped and, pointing a shaking finger over my head, stared as one who saw a sight to blast him, and whispered in a voice of horror: "Look! look! behind you. God! I stabbed him thrice. Yet now he is come back. See him, look to him at the open door. 'Tis Winstanley, the diver of Liverpool. Ah! take those eyes away from me--away--away! 'Twas your hand did it, not mine," and with a shriek the wretch buried his head in his own hands. That the murdered diver was not there I did know very well, yet the ravings of the man, the melancholy of the hut in the wood, the dimness of the lamp, all made my very flesh to creep, and instinctively I did cast my eye over my shoulder, seeing, as was certain, nought but the moon's flood pouring in at the door. Yet I shivered as with a palsy, for though no ghost was there all around me was ghostly, horrible! With a yell Alderly sprang to his feet a moment after he had sunk his head in his hands; his looks were worse now than before, his madness stronger upon him; great flecks of foam upon his lips, and from his wound the blood trickling anew. "Away! away!" he shouted. Then moaned. "Those eyes! those eyes! They scorch my very soul. Away!" And he cowered and shrank, but a minute later seemed to have recovered his old ferocity. "Begone!" he now commanded the spectre of his distorted vision. "Begone!" and with that he rushed forward, forgetting in his madness the table was betwixt him and his fears, and knocking it over in the rush. And with it the lamp went too. Only fortunately it was at its end, there was no longer any oil in it--otherwise the hut would have been burnt to the ground. But all was now darkness save for the moonlight on the floor within and on the brushwood without, and, as Alderly recovered himself from his entanglement with the fallen table and trestles, I could see it shining upon his glaring, savage eyes. And he took me--I having been knocked to the door by the crash--for the ghost of the diver, the spirit he feared so much. "Peace, you fool!" I exclaimed, "there is no spirit here, nought worse than yourself. And stand back, or, by the God above, I will blow your frenzied brains out," and as I spoke, I drew a pistol, cocked it and covered him.