"For that’s beyond our province. They say, for instance, that Devereux is mad: what they mean is that they can’t fathom him. His life, likewise, hasn’t been charted. Well, what’s the difficulty? All the lives and islands haven’t been discovered yet. And there are certain bald facts, written in black-and-white records, that seem to support his claim...." A waxy Chinaman changed our tea. Nichols gazed thoughtfully into the soft darkness beyond the terrace, getting his story under way. "Devereux is no longer a young man, as you see" he began slowly "I’d say he was about our own age. He was born and reared, I believe, in our own New England, though I’ve never heard the name of his home town. I presume he had parents there once, brothers and sisters, maybe a sweetheart. The Devereuxs, you know, are a fine family, with strains of originality cropping out here and there, which might once in a while have amounted to genius in a free atmosphere. They’re a high-strung breed. I’d be willing to affirm that, even before the episode of the island, this particular Devereux was a serious and romantic soul. Look at his face, hanging in the glow of that lantern. Temperament, sensibility, melancholy.... But what he was, and what he might have been, are both sunk in the tremendous distances of a lifetime, obscured by the apparition of an island, the wraith of a tragic destiny. "He went to sea, in the wake of his generation. At the age of twenty-one, he had worked up from the forecastle to a room on the port side of the forward cabin; in due time he became first mate of the ship _Evening Star_. I forget who was captain of her, or what was the name of the second mate who managed to reach Callao in the whaleboat. Those who survived the disaster have vanished along with those who never returned, and Devereux alone has perpetuated the event in nautical history because of a madness that descended on him out of the sky.