"But Jack Poyntz never troubled his head with such fancies, sir; and times, when I'd stowed my boat away, I'd hail him, and have him down to the house; and sitting snug together by the kitchen fire, many a strange yarn has he spun me, the like of which never was heard before--leastways not outside of the books that were hid in his library--and of which many were writ in strange tongues as are not spoken in our Christian times. But it's not for me to be repeating of 'em now, only, as I was a-telling ye, it was such-like things brought us acquainted; and very good chums we were, allowing for his being a young gentleman scholar, and me a sailor as had no great book-learning, though knowing more of men and things than a hundred such as him. And by the end of a couple of years or so, meeting him that way off and on, I knew him as well as ever anybody knew him--as well, maybe, as he knew himself. "Well, things being this way, one day, about the last week in September, it came on to blow. There was no rain, but no moon either, and the air was thick; and night coming on, it was as black as my hat. It wasn't long afore there was a heavy sea running, and ye could have heard the surf on them Devil's Ribs five miles inland. I shipped the lantern up in the fore gable as usual, though knowing it couldn't show far in such a night; and, thinks I, see it or not, any ship that gets caught in the tide this weather is bound to wreck; so I'll hope, says I to myself, that they'll give us a wide berth. Howbe, I wasn't sleepy, so I loaded my pipe, and, thinks I, I'll have a snug smoke and a drop of grog alongside the kitchen fire afore turning in. No chance, thinks I, of my Scholar happening in this night; he never could beat up against that wind, not if he had Davy Jones himself to pilot him. Well, there I sat for maybe an hour, the noise of the storm getting ever louder and louder, so at times I could hardly hear the rattle of my spoon as I stirred up the grog in the tumbler. Then all of a sudden there comes a knocking at the door, quick and heavy, and up I jumps and opens it, and lo! there was the Scholar, with no hat and no coat, and that strange-coloured hair of his blown up wild about his head, and his eyes wide open and bright as a binnacle. "'Why don't you come in, sir?' shouts I, loud as if I was a-hailing him at the maintop, such a noise the wind made; 'ye'll get the heart and lungs blown clean out of ye if ye stop there!'