when, from some strange and unaccountable reason, it suddenly became dim
and defied all his efforts to revive it. To add to his discomfiture,
he could see quite plainly through the lantern a strange-looking vessel
standing in from the sea. She was so clearly out of her course for the
Gate that he knew she had not seen the light, and his limbs trembled
with shame and terror as he tried in vain to rekindle the dying light.
Yet to his surprise the strange ship kept steadily on, passing the
dangerous reef of rocks, until she was actually in the waters of the
bay. But stranger than all, swimming beneath her bows was the golden
head and laughing face of the Indian girl, even as he had seen it the
day before. A strange revulsion of feeling overtook him. Believing that
she was luring the ship to its destruction, he ran out on the beach
and strove to hail the vessel and warn it of its impending doom. But he
could not speak--no sound came from his lips. And now his attention was
absorbed by the ship itself. High-bowed and pooped, and curved like the
crescent moon, it was the strangest craft that he had ever seen. Even
as he gazed it glided on nearer and nearer, and at last beached itself
noiselessly on the sands before his own feet. A score of figures
as bizarre and outlandish as the ship itself now thronged its high
forecastle--really a castle in shape and warlike purpose--and leaped
from its ports. The common seamen were nearly naked to the waist; the
officers looked more like soldiers than sailors. What struck him more
strangely was that they were one and all seemingly unconscious of the
existence of the lighthouse, sauntering up and down carelessly, as if on
some uninhabited strand, and even talking--so far as he could understand
their old bookish dialect--as if in some hitherto undiscovered land.
Their ignorance of the geography of the whole coast, and even of the sea
from which they came, actually aroused his critical indignation; their
coarse and stupid allusions to the fair Indian swimmer as the "mermaid"
that they had seen upon their bow made him more furious still. Yet