A lookout on the fore t'gallant yard was also stationed during the daytime. Several more small islands were passed, the distant palm trees seeming like a low broken comb upon the horizon, for we gave them plenty of offing as the atoll formation often throws its reefs far out. Several times our course was altered to do this. In the fo'c'sle we had a round of mystery stories about islands mainly. One by Frenchy took the prize for heavy ghost atmosphere and when told in the dusk of a last dog watch with only the stars overhead to wink at its absurdity, the effect was all that could be desired. This tale had to do with an invisible island, situated somewhere about the Loyalty Group near New Caledonia. The island was invisible by day but could be found by a night landfall, and indeed was so discovered by that tight little brig the _Père Duchêsne_, owned and sailed by no less a person than the notorious Jean Ravail, who did not, as Frenchy assured me, perish in the sewers of Paris, as was supposed. Ravail was a pirate, of course, though he sailed as a peaceful trader, exchanging cognac and rum for bêche-de-mer, through the southern islands of Polynesia. Driving onto the ghostly island in the blackness of the night, anchor was let go just in time to prevent the brig from running up the beach, and then, to the tune of entrancing music, the whole crew, led by Ravail himself, were decoyed ashore by women in flowing robes of white. They left to a man, even old Pouly, the mate, who held out to the last until a scantily draped siren came aboard and carried him ashore in her canoe. The story is supposed to have been found entered by Pouly in the logbook of the brig when she was picked up by the frigate _La Perouse_, drifting with her cable chafed through by the coral reef. Many weeks of cruising failed to locate the island. I always liked this story, for Frenchy enjoyed telling it and did it remarkably well. The starboard watch also stirred uneasily after the mirage and as a direct result of it Charlie Horse got religion. Not that he had not always had it, but these singular events merely brought it to the surface as it were. Charlie Horse began where our late shipmate Jimmy left off. He was extremely rigorous in his beliefs and did not hesitate to preach infant damnation, advising all of us who had not been duly baptized to rectify this mistake as soon as possible. He paid special attention to John Aahee of his watch, and to that simple-minded native the awful creed of Charlie Horse was a throbbing reality. The existence of purgatory was assured; hell was a positive fact, a hot and terrible place of torture. Often during a brief dog watch of a Sunday, the port side would get some of the overflow, which we listened to with varying tolerance; his own watchmates had arrived at the point of active protest.