"It may come to me in a dream," continued the poor man, "or it may be revealed to me in a whisper. I believe with Milton that the air is thronged with millions of spiritual beings. I have in my watches, when a mate, heard whispers in the dark! I believe in God the Father Almighty"--and he recited the Apostles' Creed whilst he stroked the head of his dog, who sat at his side. "It is a glorious confession, Mr. Hardy. What should make a man more religious than the sea life? They think us a breed of blasphemers, but to whom is the glory and the majesty and the power of the Supreme unfolded if not to the sailor? We behold the birth of the day, and witness the sublimity of the Spirit in the glittering temples of the east, from which the sun springs, to reveal the marvel of the ocean and the heavens to the sight of man; and we witness the death of the day, gorgeous and kingly in its departure, over which the angels spread a funeral pall sparkling with the diamonds of the night." He pressed his hands to his brow and sighed with that long tremor in which the broken heart often vents itself. The night passed quietly. The breeze yet slackened and was blowing a gentle wind at midnight. There was a moon somewhere in the sky, and her light fell upon the dark waters, and the sight of the small seas, curling in frosted silver through the radiance, was as beautiful as the picture of the ship stemming softly, her canvas stirless as carven shields of marble. The captain came and went throughout the night, and no man aboard saving Hardy would have dreamt of holding him mad and irresponsible. Candy, when his watch was up, had nothing to report but this: that the skipper would walk the deck fast, abruptly halting at the weather-rail to stare at the ocean in pauses running into minutes, then crossing to the lee-rail to stare again in passages of dumb scrutiny. What more conceivable than that the afflicted man should be full of the memory of his lost child, and that he should break off in his walk to meditate upon the mighty grave in whose heart his little one was sleeping? Candy thought thus, and so did the helmsman, who would find the men he talked to about it of his own mind when he was relieved at the wheel and went forward. And so the night passed into the sad light of dawn, which brightened into the glory of a morning full of sunshine. The breeze had shifted three points, and the ship was sailing slowly with the yards square and the weather-clew of the mainsail up. Now was to happen the strangest incident in this ship's adventure. It was Nelson who said that nothing is impossible or improbable in sea-affairs. There is no invention of man that can top the grim, the grotesque, the beautiful, the sublime, or the touching facts which the great mystery of liquid surface yields to human experience. A seaman, who was sitting astride of the starboard foretopsail yard-arm, busy with marline-spike on some job that the lift needed, hailed the deck.