"'This,' I answered, waving my hand around—'this freak of turning a back room into a cabin.'
"He stared at me, and then burst into a malevolent laugh.
"'Back room, by thunder!' said he. 'Why, of course—just a step into the garden where the roses and the buttercupses be agrowing.'
"Now I pricked my ears.
"'Has the night turned foul?' I muttered. 'What a noise the rain makes beating on the window!'
"'It's like to be a foul one for you, at least,' said he. 'But, as for the rain, it's blazing moonlight.'
"I turned to the broad casement in astonishment. My God! what did I see? Oh, my friend, my friend! will you believe me? By the melancholy glow that spread therethrough I saw that the whole room was rising and sinking in rhythmical motion; that the lights of King's Cobb had disappeared, and that in their place was revealed a world of pale and tossing water, the pursuing waves of which leapt and clutched at the glass with innocuous fingers.
"I started to my feet, mad in an instant.
"'Look, look!' I shrieked. 'They follow us—they struggle to get at you, you bloody murderer!'
"They came rising on the crests of the billows; they hurried fast in our wake, tumbling and swaying, their stretched, drowned faces now lifted to the moonlight, now over-washed in the long trenches of water. They were rolled against the galleries of glass, on which their hair slapped like ribbons of seaweed—a score of ghastly white corpses, with strained black eyes and pointed stiff elbows crookt up in vain for air.