dealt now in supernal beauty, now in horror without a name, how might
they, puppets of their age, hold an even balance, know the mirage, know
the truth? Inextricably mingled were the threads of their own being, and
none could tell warp from woof, or guess the pattern that was weaving or
stay the flying shuttle. What if upon the material scroll unrolling
before them God had chosen to write strange characters? Was not the
parchment His, and how might man question that moving finger?

One day they discerned an island, fair and clear against the
horizon--undoubtedly there, although no chart made mention of it. All
saw the island; but when one man cried out at the amazing height of its
snowy peak another laughed him to scorn, declaring the peak a cloud, and
spoke of sand-dunes topped with low bushes. A third clamored of a fair
white city, an evident harbor, and the masts of great ships; a fourth,
every whit as positive, stood out for unbroken forests and surf upon a
lonely reef. While they contended, the island vanished. Then they knew
that they had seen St. Brandon's Isle, and in his prayer at the setting
of the watch the chaplain made mention of the matter. On a night when
all the sea was phosphorescent, Thynne the master saw in the wake of the
_Cygnet_ a horned spirit, very black and ugly, leaping from one fiery
ripple to another, but when he called on Christ's name, rushing madly
away, full tilt into the setting moon. Again, Ferne and young Sedley,
pacing the poop beneath a sky of starry splendor, and falling silent
after talk that had travelled from Petrarch and Ariosto to that _Faerie
Queene_ which Edmund Spenser was writing, heard a faint sweet singing
far across the deep. "Hark!" breathed Sedley. "The strange sweet
sound.... Surely mermaiden singing!"

"I know not," replied Ferne, his hands upon the railing. "Perchance 'tis
so. They say they are fair women.... The sound is gone. I would I might