of the ghost-girls and the grumbling of
families who had lost an ancestor, the village was upset for a while,
and the funny thing was that it was the folk who had complained most
of the carryings-on of the youngsters, who made most noise now that
they were gone. I hadn't any sympathy with shoemaker or butcher, who
ran about saying how much they missed their lads, but it made me
grieve to hear the poor bereaved girls calling their lovers by name
on the village green at nightfall. It didn't seem fair to me that
they should have lost their men a second time, after giving up life
in order to join them, as like as not. Still, not even a spirit can
be sorry for ever, and after a few months we made up our mind that
the folk who had sailed in the ship were never coming back, and we
didn't talk about it any more.

And then one day, I dare say it would be a couple of years after,
when the whole business was quite forgotten, who should come
trapesing along the road from Portsmouth but the daft lad who had
gone away with the ship, without waiting till he was dead to become a
ghost. You never saw such a boy as that in all your life. He had a
great rusty cutlass hanging to a string at his waist, and he was
tattooed all over in fine colours, so that even his face looked like
a girl's sampler. He had a handkerchief in his hand full of foreign
shells and old-fashioned pieces of small money, very curious, and he
walked up to the well outside his mother's house and drew himself a
drink as if he had been nowhere in particular.

The worst of it was that he had come back as soft-headed as he went,
and try as we might we couldn't get anything reasonable out of him.
He talked a lot of gibberish about keel-hauling and walking the
plank and crimson murders--things which a decent sailor should know
nothing about, so that it seemed to me that for all his manners
Captain had been more of a pirate than a gentleman mariner. But to
draw sense out of that boy was as hard as picking cherries off a
crab-tree. One silly tale he had that he kept on drifting back to,
and to hear him you would have thought that it was the only thing
that happened to him in his life. "We was at anchor," he would say,
"off an island called the Basket of Flowers, and the sailors had
caught a lot of parrots and we were teaching them to swear. Up and
down the decks, up and down the decks, and the language they used
was dreadful. Then we looked up and saw the masts of the Spani