You may guess those on deck did a little more than stare at this strange and unexpected apparition. By jingo, I never saw men open their eyes wider in all my life, nor was I any exception to the rule. I stared, as well I might; but we said nothing for some minutes, and the stranger looked calmly on us, and then cocked his eye with a nautical air up at the sky, as if he expected to receive a twopenny-post letter from St. Michael, or a _billet doux_ from the Virgin Mary. “Where has he come from?” said one of the men in a low tone to his companion, who was standing by him at that moment. “How can I tell?” replied his companion. “He may have dropped from the clouds; he seems to be examining the road; perhaps he is going back.” The stranger sat all this time with the most extreme and provoking coolness and unconcern; he deigned us but a passing notice, but it was very slight. He was a tall, spare man—what is termed long and lathy—but he was evidently a powerful man. He had a broad chest, and long, sinewy arms, a hooked nose, and a black, eagle eye. His hair was curly, but frosted by age; it seemed as though it had been tinged with white at the extremities, but he was hale and active otherwise, to judge from appearances. Notwithstanding all this, there was a singular repulsiveness about him that I could not imagine the cause, or describe; at the same time there was an air of determination in his wild and singular-looking eyes, and over their whole there was decidedly an air and an appearance so sinister as to be positively disagreeable. “Well,” said I, after we had stood some minutes, “where did you come from, shipmate?” He looked at me and then up at the sky, in a knowing manner. “Come, come, that won’t do; you have none of Peter Wilkins’s wings, and couldn’t come on the ærial dodge; it won’t do; how did you get here?” He gave me an awful wink, and made a sort of involuntary movement, which jumped him up a few inches, and he bumped down again on the water-cask. “That’s as much as to say,” thought I, “that he’s sat himself on it.” “I’ll go and inform the captain,” said I, “of this affair; he’ll hardly believe me when I tell him, I am sure.” So saying, I left the deck and went to the cabin, where the captain was at breakfast, and related to him what I had seen respecting the stranger. The captain looked at me with an air of disbelief, and said,— “What?—do you mean to say there’s a man on board we haven’t seen before?” “Yes, I do, captain. I never saw him afore, and he’s sitting beating his heels on the water-cask on deck.” “The devil!” “He is, I assure you, sir; and he won’t answer any questions.” “I’ll see to that. I’ll see if I can’t make the lubber say something, providing his tongue’s not cut out. But how came he on board? Confound it, he can’t be the devil, and dropped from the moon.”