the boat, and when they threw him in the sea, he swam very quietly to his companions."

"What was the ship?" I asked.

"A Spaniard," she replied. "After they had put the ship before the wind I saw a number of them on the poop on their knees crossing themselves."

"I cannot understand," said I, "why this ship should be termed a Phantom. What could be more real than these timbers and the requirements of the people who navigate her?"

"Besides," exclaimed Imogene, "if she is a Phantom, how could Vanderdecken write those letters in her which he is supposed to desire to send home? If you have a real letter, such as a person can put into his pocket and deliver, you must have real materials to produce it, ink, pens, paper, wafers, and something hard to sit upon, or kneel upon, or write upon."

"Certainly!" said I. "Of a Phantom the whole must be phantasmal. Suppose a ghost dressed, its attire must be as unsubstantial as the essence it covers."

"The truth about this ship is not known," she continued, "and it never can be known, because her influence is dreaded. Vessels on finding out her character fly from her, and those who sell to her unsuspectingly pass away without giving her further thought."

"Or," said I, gloomily, "perhaps are never more heard of."

In this way would we talk, and you may conceive we were at no loss for topics. On several occasions she showed me some of the dresses Vanderdecken had furnished her with; of which I chiefly remember a chintz gown, spotted with roses, with sleeves swelling out like ruffs at the elbows; a pink dress, with a girdle to bring the waist close under the bosom; and a slate-coloured dress, with a red shawl for it, to be worn like a sash, and a kerchief for the throat; and I also recollect that she showed me some strange, very dainty caps, one to sit on the back of the head, another of black velvet and a feather, which she told me Vanderdecken had said was worn on the side of the head. She put it on to explain its use, and a man's true darling she looked in it.

Once she came into the cabin dressed in the pink dress with the high waist; and very sweet did she appear. But I said to her that of all the apparel she had shown me nothing pleased me better than the black velvet jacket in which I had first seen her, and thereafter she constantly wore it.

In short, the clothes Vanderdecken had stocked her cabin with, including much fine linen, lace, collars, long gloves, shoes of several colours, and the like, were such as to suggest a costly theatrical wardrobe by reason of the variety of the styles representing fashions from the middle of the seventeenth century down to within twenty years of the time in which happened what I am here relating. It has been already explained how these things were gotten. You have only to consider that this ship sailed from Batavia in 1653, with a large stock of dresses, linen, jewellery, plate and so forth in her hold, besides her cargo, which stock Vanderdecken, in whom there must still work the thrifty instincts of the Hollander, just as he is suffered to love his pipe and bowl, and pine for both when the tobacco and spirits have run out, had replenished by appropriating such wares, treasure and apparel as he had a fancy for out of the ships he encountered abandoned at sea or cast away upon the African coast. You have only to consider this, I say, and bear in mind the great number of years he has been afloat, and how many scores of richly-laden merchantmen have passed and repassed that part of the ocean to which the Curse confines him, to find nothing to marvel at in any catalogue of the contents of the Braave that could be offered.

Besides having all these strange and often sumptuous articles of attire to show me and talk about, Imogene had a great deal to tell me concerning the weary years she had spent in the vessel, wondering how her life was to end, how she was ever to get to England or to any other civilized country if Vanderdecken refused to let her leave him, because of his fatherly affection for her and his conviction that he was homeward bound, and only temporarily delayed by the north-west gales which beat him back. She said that after a time she began to fear that she would lose her own language and be able to speak no tongue but the ancient Dutch in which Vanderdecken and his men conversed, to preserve herself from which calamity she regularly perused the collection of English poetry that the captain most fortunately had among his books. Her grief was that the book, instead of poems, was not the Holy Scriptures, but she knew many prayers and hymns her mother had taught her, and these she never omitted reciting morning and night.

You would have been touched had you heard her, marked the sadness that rendered Madonna-like the character of her fragile, delicate beauty, observed the girlish innocence of the expression that shone with the moisture of unwept tears in the eyes she fixed on me, and then considered how she had been bereaved, how frightful for tediousness and dullness, and for the association of the mysterious beings into whose society she had been cast, must have been the five years she had spent on the Death Ship. I remember asking if she knew what religion Vanderdecken was of; she answered she did not know for certain, but that she had heard him speak of his wife and family as having worshipped in the Oude Kerk.

"Indeed, Mr. Fenton," said she, "I don't believe he is or was of any religion at all. Van Vogelaar is a Calvinist; he told me so one evening when I was speaking with surprise of Antony Jans being a Catholic, as it is almost impossible to reconcile the fatness of that man with the austerities and mortifications of his creed."

"There can be no doubt," said I, "that Vanderdecken was—when human like you and me, without religion. His shocking defiance, and the condemnation that followed, proved that he acted out of sheer sin in his soul, and not out of a passing passion. And yet you would have supposed that a Dutchman, no matter how secretly impious, would have behaved with more discretion than this skipper."

"I dare say he would have been more discreet," said Imogene, "had he imagined what was to follow."

It was in this way, and in such talk, that we killed those six days of storm; and now I come to other matters.

CHAPTER IV.
THE GALE BREAKS.

On the sixth day, during dinner, Vanderdecken said he believed we had seen the worst of the storm. There was a small lull in the wind, and a faintness sifting up, so to speak, from behind the peaks and valleys of the horizon into the sky all around, like a very dim dawning of fair weather innumerable leagues distant yet.

"I shall be glad to see the sun again," said Imogene.

"Let us get quit of these waters," exclaimed Vanderdecken, moodily, and often dropping his knife and fork to take his beard in both hands and stroke it with a fixed look in his eyes, which would have made you swear he beheld a vision, "and we shall have so much sun every day climbing higher and higher until it hangs right over our mastheads like a flaming shield that the coolness of the Biscayan Sea and the entrance of the English Channel shall be sweet as drink to a dry man."

"Pray, mynheer," said I, "how far to the eastwards do you suppose this gale has driven us?"

He looked at me with a sudden temper in his face as if he would crush me for daring to ask. Nevertheless, he answered, but with a deep thrill in the rich