which I did
not catch, but which raised a general laugh.

Wolf Larsen made the same demand of the sailors. Bibles and Prayer-books
seemed scarce articles, but one of the men volunteered to pursue the
quest amongst the watch below, returning in a minute with the information
that there was none.

The captain shrugged his shoulders. "Then we'll drop him over without
any palavering, unless our clerical-looking castaway has the burial
service at sea by heart."

By this time he had swung fully around and was facing me. "You're a
preacher, aren't you?" he asked.

The hunters,--there were six of them,--to a man, turned and regarded me.
I was painfully aware of my likeness to a scarecrow. A laugh went up at
my appearance,--a laugh that was not lessened or softened by the dead man
stretched and grinning on the deck before us; a laugh that was as rough
and harsh and frank as the sea itself; that arose out of coarse feelings
and blunted sensibilities, from natures that knew neither courtesy nor
gentleness.

Wolf Larsen did not laugh, though his grey eyes lighted with a slight
glint of amusement; and in that moment, having stepped forward quite
close to him, I received my first impression of the man himself, of the
man as apart from his body, and from the torrent of blasphemy I had heard
him spew forth. The face, with large features and strong lines, of the
square order, yet well filled out, was apparently massive at first sight;
but again, as with the body, the massiveness seemed to vanish, and a
conviction to grow of a tremendous and excessive mental or spiritual
strength that lay behind, sleeping in the deeps of his being. The jaw,
the chin, the brow rising to a goodly height and swelling heavily above
the eyes,--these, while strong in themselves, unusually strong, seemed to
speak an immense vigour or virility of spirit that lay behind and beyond
and out of sight. There was no sounding such a spirit, no measuring, no
determining of metes and bounds, nor neatly classifying in some
pigeon-hole with others of similar type.

The eyes--and it was my destiny to know them well--were large and
handsome, wide apart as the true artist's are wide, sheltering under a
heavy brow and arched over by thick black eyebrows. The eyes themselves
were of that baffling protean grey which is never twice the same; which
runs through many shades and colourings like intershot silk in sunshine;
which is grey, dark and light, and greenish-gre