eager listening. My breath grew thick and short; the horror of this situation is not to be conceived. It was not as though I were in an earthly ship, for in that case, no matter who the midnight intruder, he would have had a mortal throat for my fingers to close upon. But whoever this shape might be he belonged to the Death Ship, and 'twas frightful to see his outline, black as the atmosphere of a churchyard grave, thrown out, in its posture of watching and listening, by the fiery, writhing fibrines of the phosphor, to know that the deep and hollow breathing came from a figure in whom life was a monstrous simulation, to feel that his confrontment by an Hercules or a Goliath would as little quail his endevilled spirit as the dead are to be terrified by the menaces of the living.

I watched with half-suffocated respiration. Since his outline was plain it was sure mine was so likewise; but I could not distinguish that he was looking towards the place where I stood, that is, in the middle of the after bulkhead, a couple of paces from the foot of the bed, whither I had backed on his entering.

He very softly closed the door, on which I drew myself up waiting for the onslaught I was certain he designed, though when I considered what thing it was I should be dealing with, the sense of my helplessness came very near to breaking me down. Having closed the door he approached the bed, and bent his head down as though listening; then, with amazing swiftness, stabbed at the bed four times, each blow, with the vehemence of it, making a distinct sound; after which he hung over the bed with his arm uplifted and his head bent as though he would make sure by listening that he had dispatched me. His figure was so plain that it was as if you should cut out the shape of a man in black paper and paste it upon a dull yellow ground. From the upraised hand I could distinguish the projection of a knife or small sword not less than a foot long. He was not apparently easily satisfied that I lay dead; for he kept his menacing, hearkening posture while I could have counted sixty; he then went lightly to the door, opened it and passed out.

Whether he walked in his sleep—and certainly his motions were those of a somnambulist—or whether he was influenced by some condition of his doom, of a character as unconjecturable as the manner in which vitality was preserved among the crew, who were years and years ago dead in time, I could not conceive; but, resolved to discover him if I could, I followed on his heels, catching the door as it swung from his grasp; but there was no need to close it nor slip a foot beyond the coaming; for, the glimmer all about serving my sight, I saw him enter the cabin opposite—that in which Van Vogelaar slept, whereby I knew who it was that would have assassinated me that night had I slept when I lay down.

You will easily credit that this man had murdered sleep so far as I was concerned. I would not go on deck, and I would not lie down either, for what I had beheld had so wrought in my imagination that the mere idea of resting upon the holes which the villain's blade had made in the aged mattress filled me with horror. So for the rest of the night I walked about the cabin or rested on the edge of the bed, praying for daylight, and repeatedly commending myself to God; for, this being the second time my life had been attempted by the same hand, I could not question, if it was the will of Heaven this hideous cruise should be prolonged, the third venture would be successful, and in the dreadful loneliness and luminous blackness of that cabin I viewed myself as a dead man, and could have wept with rage and grief when thinking of my helplessness and of Imogene's fate.

However, I clearly saw that no good could attend my telling Vanderdecken of his mate's hunger for my life. If Van Vogelaar had walked in his sleep he would not know what he had done; he would call me a liar for charging him with it, and I might count upon Vanderdecken siding with him in any case. The Dutch are a less savage people than they were, but in the age to which this ship's company belonged they were the most inhuman people in Europe, perhaps in the world, and such were the barbarities they were guilty of, that the passage of two centuries—and it would be the same if it were the passage of two hundred centuries—leaves their crimes as fresh and smoking to God as the blood of their victims at the time of their being done to death. Consider their treatment of sailors: how for a petty theft they would proclaim a man infamous at the fore-mast; torture him into confession by attaching heavy weights to his feet, running him aloft, and then letting him fall; keel-haul him, that is, draw him several times under the ship's keel; affix him to the mast by nailing him to it by a knife passed through his hand; flog him to the extent of three hundred to five hundred strokes, then pickle his bleeding mangled back; fling him ironed into the hold: there half-starve him till they met with a bare, barren, lonely rock upon which they would set and leave him. Read how they treated the English at Amboyna! No! I had the Dutch of the seventeenth century to deal with in these men, not the Hollanders of my day, borrowing fine airs from the Germans and sweetening their throats with French à la mode phrases. But how to escape them? There were moments when I paced my cabin like a madman and with a madman's thoughts in me too.

I brought a haggard face with me to the breakfast table, and Imogene surveyed me with an eye full of inquiry and anxiety. My thoughts, acting with my wakefulness, had told, and I fancied that even Vanderdecken suffered his gaze to rest upon me as though he marked a change. Van Vogelaar's manner satisfied me that he had acted in his sleep or under some spell that stupefied the understanding whilst it gave the spirit full play, for he discovered nothing of that wonder and terror which had been visible in him when I entered the cabin after his former attempt to destroy me, which certainly had not been the case had he quitted my bedside in the belief that I was dead of my wounds.

Vanderdecken talked of the fair wind; a sort of satisfaction illuminated his sombre austerity; though his dignity was prodigious and his commanding manner full of an haughty and forbidding sternness, he was nevertheless politer to me than he had ever yet been, going to the length of talking about the food on the table, the excellent quality of the African Guinea fowl and bustard, recommending me to taste of a dish of marmalade, and relating a story of a privateer having left behind him, in a ship he had clapt aboard of, a number of boxes which seemed to be full of marmalade, but which in reality were loaded with virgin silver. But it was the fair wind that produced this civility, though after last night's business 'twas welcome enough let the cause be what it would.