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himself to be, like the prophets of ancient times, in a Divine Presence, the Old One, his face strangely youthful in its repose, threw back his head and softly laughed, as if there high on the poop he were a god of the heathen, who could blot out with his thumb the ship and all the souls that sailed in her. His face had again a haunting likeness to the devils in the old wood-cuts; and indeed there is something of the devil in the very egotism of a man who can thus assert his vain notions at such an hour.

Presently descending from the poop and with a nod passing on the quarter-deck the officer of the watch, he paced for a time the maintop-deck. He pretended to absorb himself in the sea and the damage the storm had done to the waist; but he missed nothing that happened and he observed the whereabouts of every man in the watch.

Edging slowly forward, he stood at last beside a big man who was leaning in the shadow of the forecastle.

“We meet sooner than you thought," he said in a low voice.

“Yea, for we were long on the road and entangled ourselves wonderfully among those byways and highways which cross the country in a manner perplexing beyond belief.”

‘‘Saw you your brother?”

"In all truth I saw him — and the Devil take him!”

The Old One laughed softly.

“It is plain thy brother hath little love for a shipwrecked mariner,” quoth he, ‘‘yet there is a most memorable antiquity about the use of ships, and even greater gluttons than thy brother have supped light that worthy seamen might not go hungry to bed. We will