I ask you just to believe this much: that I for my part feel sure (except sometimes by daylight) that I was not more than half asleep when a footfall seemed to come in the path, and waked me entirely. It didn't sound,--only seemed to come. I believe, then, that I woke, roused up on my elbow, and stared over at the opening among the bamboos where the path came into the clearing. Some one moved down the bank, and drew slowly forward to the edge of the firelight. A strange, whispering, uncertain kind of voice said something,--something in Dutch. I didn't catch the words, and it spoke again:-- "What night of the month is this night?" If awake, I was just enough so to think this a natural question to be asked first off, out here in the wilds. "It's the 6th," I answered in Dutch. "Come down to the fire, Mynheer." You know how bleary and sightless your eyes are for a moment, waking, after the glare of these days. The figure seemed to come a little nearer, but I could only see that it was a man dressed in black. Even that didn't seem odd. "Of what month?" the stranger said. The voice was what the French call "veiled." "June," I answered. "And what year?" he asked. I told him--or It. "He is very late," said the voice, like a sigh. "He should have sent long ago." Only at this point did the whole thing begin to seem queer. As evidence that I must have been awake, I recalled afterwards that my arm had been made numb by the pressure of my head upon it while lying down, and now began to tingle. "It is very late," the voice repeated. "Perhaps too late----" The fire settled, flared up fresh, and lighted the man's face dimly,--a long, pale face with gray mustache and pointed beard. He was all in black, so that his outline was lost in darkness; but I saw that round his neck was a short white ruff, and that heavy leather boots hung in folds, cavalier-fashion, from his knees. He wavered there in the dark, against the flicker of the bamboo shadows, like a picture by that Dutch fellow--What's-his-name-again--a very dim, shaky, misty Rembrandt. "And you, Mynheer," he went on, in the same toneless voice, "from where do you come to this shore?" "From Singapore," I managed to reply. "From Singapura," he murmured. "And so white men live there now?--_Ja, ja_, time has passed." Up till now I may have only been startled, but this set me in a blue funk. It struck me all at once that this shaky old whisper of a voice was not speaking the Dutch of nowadays. I never before knew the depths, the essence, of that uncertainty which we call fear. In the silence, I thought a drum was beating,--it was the pulse in my ears. The fire close by was suddenly cold. "And now you go whither?" it said. "To Batavia," I must have answered, for it went on:--