ich their hair slapped like
ribbons of seaweed--a score of ghastly white corpses, with strained black
eyes and pointed stiff elbows crookt up in vain for air.

"I was mad, but I knew it all now. This was no house, but the good,
ill-fated vessel _Rayo,_ once bound for Jamaica, but on the voyage fallen
into the hands of the bloody buccaneer, Paul Hardman, and her crew made
to walk the plank, and most of her passengers. I knew that the dark
scoundrel had boarded and mastered her, and--having first fired and sunk
his own sloop--had steered her straight for the Cuban coast, making
disposition of what remained of the passengers on the way, and I knew
that my great-grandfather had been one of these doomed survivors, and
that he had been shot and murdered under orders of the ruffian that now
sat before me. All this, as retailed by one who sailed for a season under
Hardman to save his skin, is matter of old private history; and of common
report was it that the monster buccaneer, after years of successful
trading in the ship he had stolen, went into secret and prosperous
retirement under an assumed name, and was never heard of more on the high
seas. But, it seemed, it was for the great-grandson of one of his victims
to play yet a sympathetic part in the grey old tragedy.

"How did this come to me in a moment--or, rather, what was that dream
buzzing in my brain of 'proof' and 'copy' and all the tame stagnation
of a long delirium of order? I had nothing in common with the latter. In
some telepathic way--influenced by these past-dated surroundings--dropped
into the very den of this Procrustes of the seas, I was there to re-enact
the fearful scene that had found its climax in the brain of my ancestor.

"I rushed to the window, thence back to within a yard of the glowering
buccaneer, before whom I stood, with tost arms, wild and menacing.

"'They follow you!' I screamed. 'Passive, relentless, and deadly, they
follow in your wake and will not be denied. The strong, the helpless,
the coarse and the beautiful--all you have killed and mutilated in your
wanton devilry--they are on your heels like a pack of spectre-hounds, and
sooner or later they will have you in their cold arms and hale you down
to the secret places of terror. Look at Beston, who leads, with a fearful
smile on his mouth! Look at that pale girl you tortured, whose hair
writhes and lengthens--a swarm of snakes nosing the hull for some open
port-hole to enter by! Dog and d