It was a Saturday night. They had been three weeks at sea, with fine weather nearly all the time, so no wonder all hands were happy, fore and aft.
Now I have said that this skipper was an old-fashioned sailor, and so he was; and this being Saturday night, he determined, as he always did, that his men should enjoy themselves forward as much as the officers aft. There was singing, therefore, and dancing, and sea-pie. A glorious sea-pie steamed on the table of the quarter-deck, and a dozen of the same sort aft.
Rory O’Reilly was the mate’s name; the life and soul of the mess he was. He could sing a song or tell a story with any one.
“Dear Captain James,” he said to-night, “do tell us a story. Do you believe in the sarpint, sorr?”
Captain James quietly finished his second plate of sea-pie, and put the plate in a corner so stayed up that the ship’s motion could not displace it. For this skipper was a most methodical man. Then he took his old brown clay with its tin lid, and proceeded to fill it. He shook out the “dottle,” as the unburned portion of tobacco in the bottom was called, and put it carefully on Rory O’Reilly’s open palm, held out in a friendly and obliging way for James’s benefit. Then he loaded up to near the top with fresh cut, broke up the dottle and put that above, then pinched up the dust and put that over all, then slowly and solemnly lit up. When he had blown a few blasts of such density of volume that further proofs of the pipe’s being well lit up were needless, the skipper cleared his throat and commenced—
A Strange, Strange Story.
“Rory asked me,” he said, “if I believed in the great sea-serpent. He asked me with a kind of incredulous smile on his face, which spoke volumes as to his own disbelief. Well, I am not sitting here to-night to lay proof before you as to the actual existence of sea-serpents of a monstrous size, but I beg to remind my friend here, that not only one or two officers of the mercantile and fighting navies of the world, but dozens have come forward, and given their oath, that such monsters were seen by them, or by their whole crew, at certain times and in certain latitudes and longitudes. And these men, both at the times of the awful visitations, and at the times of their swearing to what they considered facts, were neither intoxicated nor otherwise out of their minds.
“But my story is not about sea-serpents altogether, though it may throw a new light on those submarine monsters.
“It is a strange, strange story—one told me years and years ago by my gallant old grandfather. I remember, as though it were but yester evening, the first time I heard him tell it.
“Grandfather, mates, had at this time retired from the army. He was of an old Scottish family, that had been crushed at Culloden, so that with the exception of the half-pay a stingy government granted him, he had little else to live upon. He resided in a pretty little cottage about a quarter of a mile from our house, and it used to be my delight to visit him in the gloaming. I would go quietly in, and seat myself on a stool in a corner, and wait to be recognised. By-and-bye I would lead him to speak of the olden times, and of the battles and sieges by sea and land he had taken part in.