to the right nor left did it go, nor backward.
Right there, while I gazed upon it, it faded away, ceased to be. I
didn't die, but I swear, from what I experienced in those few succeeding
moments, that I know full well that men can die of fright. I stood
there, knife in hand, swaying automatically to the roll of the ship,
paralysed with fear. Had the Bricklayer suddenly seized my throat with
corporeal fingers and proceeded to throttle me, it would have been no
more than I expected. Dead men did rise up, and that would be the most
likely thing the malignant Bricklayer would do.

But he didn't seize my throat. Nothing happened. And, since nature
abhors a status, I could not remain there in the one place forever
paralysed. I turned and started aft. I did not run. What was the use?
What chance had I against the malevolent world of ghosts? Flight, with
me, was the swiftness of my legs. The pursuit, with a ghost, was the
swiftness of thought. And there were ghosts. I had seen one.

And so, stumbling slowly aft, I discovered the explanation of the
seeming. I saw the mizzen topmast lurching across a faint radiance of
cloud behind which was the moon. The idea leaped in my brain. I
extended the line between the cloudy radiance and the mizzen-topmast and
found that it must strike somewhere near the fore-rigging on the port
side. Even as I did this, the radiance vanished. The driving clouds of
the breaking gale were alternately thickening and thinning before the
face of the moon, but never exposing the face of the moon. And when the
clouds were at their thinnest, it was a very dim radiance that the moon
was able to make. I watched and waited. The next time the clouds
thinned I looked for'ard, and there was the shadow of the topmast, long
and attenuated, wavering and lurching on the deck and against the
rigging.

This was my first ghost. Once again have I seen a ghost. It proved to
be a Newfoundland dog, and I don't know which of us was the more
frightened, for I hit that Newfoundland a full right-arm swing to the
jaw. Regarding the Bricklayer's ghost, I will say that I never mentioned
it to a soul on board. Also, I will say that in all my life I never went
through more torment and mental suffering than on that lonely night-watch
on the _Sophie Sutherland_.

(TO THE EDITOR.--This is not a fiction. It is a true page out of my
life.)

A CLASSIC OF THE SEA

Introduction to "_Two Years before t