iling staring, heard a shrill scream from the old man and a rattle as
he dropped his fiddle, and then a flash and a red rain of blood on the
table as my Finn fell with a knife in him, the Hollander's knife,
smartly pegged in between the left breast and the shoulder. I declare
that, even in my excitement at that first sight of blood drawn in feud,
my boyish thought was half divided between the drunken quarrel and the
poor old fiddler, all hunched together on the ground and sobbing
dry-eyed in a kind of ecstasy of fear and horror. I heard afterwards
that he had a son knifed to his death in a seaman's brawl, and never got
over it. As for the Finn, they took him home and kept it dark, and he
recovered, and may be living yet for all I know to the contrary, and a
perfect pattern to the folk in Finland.

That inn had a name, stranger I have never heard; and a sign, stranger I
have never seen; though I have wandered far and seen more than old
Ulysses in the school-book ever dreamt of. It was called the Skull and
Spectacles; and if its name was at once horrible and laughable, its sign
was more devilish still. For instead of any painted board, swinging
pleasantly on fair days and creaking lustily on foul, there stood out
over the inn door a kind of bracket, and on that bracket stood a human
skull, so parched and darkened by wind and weather that it looked more
fearful than even a _caput mortuum_ has a right to look.

On the nose of this grisly reminder of our mortality some wag--or so I
suppose, but perhaps he was a cynic--had stuck a great pair of glassless
barnacles or goggles. It was a loathly conceit, and yet it added vastly
to the favour of the inn in the minds of those wildings that haunted it.
Must I add that it did so in mine too, who should have known better? If
it had not been for the fascination of that sign, perhaps I might have
kept better company, and never done what I did do, and never written
this history.

When first I happened upon the Skull and Spectacles it attracted me at
once. Its situation, in the middle of that wilderness of mouldering
wharves, decaying gardens, and tumble-down cottages, was in itself an
invitation to the eye. Then the devilish mockery of its sign was an
allurement. It looked like some fantastical tavern in a dream, and not a
thing of real timber.

The oddness of the place tickled my adventurous palate, the
loathsomeness of the sign gripped me hardly by the heart and made my
blood run