and the vastness of the liquid plain along which they coursed, furious with the fiendish lashing of the thongs of the storm, grew at times so insupportable that, sailor as I was and used to the sea in all its moods, I would often feel faint and reel to a sensation of nausea.

But Imogene was never in the least degree discomposed. She was so used to the ship that its movements were to her what the steadiness of dry land is to other women. She seldom came on deck however. Indeed, the gusts and guns were often so fierce—coming along like thunderbolts through the gale itself—that any one of them catching her gown might have carried her light figure overboard. Moreover, twenty-four hours after the gale set in, it drew up thick as mud; the horizon was brought within reach of a musket-shot; and out of this thickness blew the rain, in straight lines, mixed with the showering off the heads of the seas; the sky hung steady, of the colour of slate—no part lighter or darker than another, but so low that it appeared as if a man could whip his hand into it from our masthead whenever those reeling spars came plumb.

As it gave me no pleasure to linger on deck in such weather, you may suppose that Miss Imogene and I were much together below. Often a whole morning or afternoon would pass without a soul entering the cabin where we sate. Whether Vanderdecken was pleased to think that Imogene had a companion—a fellow-countryman, with whom she could converse, and so kill the time which he would suspect from her recent fit of weeping hung heavy on her spirits; or that, having himself long passed those marks which time sets up as the boundaries of human passions, he was as incapable of suspecting that Imogene and I should fall in love, as he clearly was of perceiving the passage of years; 'tis certain he never exhibited the smallest displeasure when, perchance, he found us together, albeit once or twice on entering the cabin when we were there he would ask Imogene abruptly, but never with the sternness his manner gathered when he addressed others, what our talk was about, as if he suspected I was inquiring about his ship and cargo; though if, indeed, this was so, I don't doubt the suspicion was put into his head by Van Vogelaar, who, I am sure, hated me as much because I was an Englishman as because our panic-stricken men had fired upon him.

It takes a man but a very short time to fall in love, though the relation of the thing, if the time be very short, is often questioned as a possibility, sometimes heartily laughed at as an absurdity, when deliberately set down in writing. Why this should be I do not know. I could point to a good many men married to women with whom they fell in love at a dance, or by seeing them in the street, or by catching sight of them in church and the like. I have known a man to become passionately enamoured of a girl by beholding her picture. And what says Marlowe?

Depend upon it, when passion is of slow growth and cultivated painfully, you may suspect a deficiency somewhere. Either the girl is not delightful of face and shape and her virtues and good qualities are hard to come at, or she is a tease and a coquette, and, in a manner of speaking, puts her foot down upon a man's heart and prevents the emotion there from shooting. There will be something wanting, something wrong, I say. Association may indeed lengthily induct one into a habit of affection, but the sort of love I have in my mind springs like a young god into a man's intelligence from a maiden's eyes.

But whether this swift passion is more lasting than the affection that is formed by slower mental processes, and which of them is the safer to trust to, is no riddle for such as I to bother over. And in sober verity, I am sorry to have been led into these remarks, which certainly should be omitted if they were not necessary as an apology.

For the truth must be told, and it is this: that the very first morning I met Imogene I fell in love with her beauty, while the long days of the storm which threw us greatly together confirmed the first movement of my heart by acquainting me with the extraordinary sweetness, innocence, gentleness and purity of her nature. These qualities, unlike the enchanting hue and brightness of her eyes, the golden falls of her hair, and her many other fairy graces, were not quickly discoverable, but they stole out during our many conversations. Who that has been to sea knows not how speedily character is discovered on shipboard? And I say that before that gale was ended I was so much in love with this fair and tender girl that I could have laid down my life to serve her.

This I should not have confessed, nor indeed made any reference to my love-passage, if it did not concern the influence exercised by the Death Ship on the lives and fortunes of those who have relations with her.

In this time our conversation was about all sorts of things—her parents, her home, her childhood, the loss of her father's ship, the friendless condition she would be in on her arrival in England should I manage to deliver her from Vanderdecken. Though when she came to that, I begged her to dismiss her fears at once and for ever, by assuring her that my mother would gladly receive her and cherish her as her own daughter, having but me to love, who was always absent. At which a faint blush sweetened her cheeks as though she suspected what was in my mind; but I was careful to hurry away from the subject, since I did not wish her then to suppose I loved her, for fear that, not having had time, as I believed, to love me, she might fall into a posture of mind calculated to baffle my hopes of carrying her away from the Braave. I told her all about myself, of the famous Fenton from whom I was descended, of my voyages, of the Saracen, whose passage to India I feared would have an ill issue now that she had met the Dutchman, and I talked again of Captain Skevington's amazing, and, as I supposed, accurate theories touching the living-dead who navigated this ship.

She had much to tell me of Vanderdecken and his ship; of unsuspecting vessels they had fallen in with, which had sold them tobacco, butter, cheese, and the like. Of others that had backed their topsails to speak, then taken fright and sailed away in hot haste.

I asked her if it was true that the captain hailed passing ships for the purpose of sending letters home. She answered no; it was not true; that was the general belief as she had heard from her father; but, as Vanderdecken did not know that he was curst—as he went on year after year, firmly believing that next time he should be successful in rounding the Cape—why should he desire to send letters home, more particularly as he regarded the Braave as one of the swiftest vessels afloat. She added, "I have never seen him write a letter, and I am certain he has never endeavoured to send one."

"But if he finds a ship willing to speak, he will send a boat?"

"Yes, always; but merely for necessaries of which he is constantly in want. Now it is tobacco; another time it will be spirits. Some few weeks since we met a ship, from which he purchased several cases of marmalade and some hams, for which Van Vogelaar paid in coin that scared them, when they put the age of the money and the appearance of this ship together; for they threw the mate overboard, and instantly made off."

"I suppose Van Vogelaar could not be drowned?" said I.

"No," said she; "he, like the rest, have no other business in life than to live. They had put the hams and marmalade into