realizing it--scared to death--by
gracious! Ridgeway, there was a pair of funks aboard this craft, eh?
Wow--yow--I could sleep--"

"I should think you could."

McCord did not answer.

"By the way," I speculated. "I guess you were right about Bjoernsen,
McCord--that is, his fooling with the foretop. He must have been caught
all of a bunch, eh?"

Again McCord failed to answer. I looked up mildly surprised, and found
his head hanging back over his chair and his mouth opened wide. He was
asleep.

[C] Reprinted by permission of the author and Messrs. Harper &
Brothers.

IX

LETTER TO SURA

PLINY, THE YOUNGER

Our leisure furnishes me with the opportunity of learning from you, and
you with that of instructing me. Accordingly, I particularly wish to
know whether you think there exist such things as phantoms, possessing
an appearance peculiar to themselves, and a certain supernatural power,
or that mere empty delusions receive a shape from our fears. For my
part, I am led to believe in their existence, especially by what I hear
happened to Curtius Rufus. While still in humble circumstances and
obscure, he was a hanger-on in the suit of the Governor of Africa. While
pacing the colonnade one afternoon, there appeared to him a female form
of superhuman size and beauty. She informed the terrified man that she
was "Africa," and had come to foretell future events; for that he would
go to Rome, would fill offices of state there, and would even return to
that same province with the highest powers, and die in it. All which
things were fulfilled. Moreover, as he touched at Carthage, and was
disembarking from his ship, the same form is said to have presented
itself to him on the shore. It is certain that, being seized with
illness, and auguring the future from the past and misfortune from his
previous prosperity, he himself abandoned all hope of life, though none
of those about him despaired.

Is not the following story again still more appalling and not less
marvellous? I will relate it as it was received by me:

There was at Athens a mansion, spacious and commodious, but of evil
repute and dangerous to health. In the dead of night there was a noise
as of iron, and, if you listened more closely, a clanking of chains was
heard, first of all from a distance, and afterward hard by. Presently a
spectre used to appear, an ancient man sinking with emaciation and
squalor, with a long beard and bristly hair, wearing shack