“‘But it was the sea sarpint, I tells you, or its own brother if it wasn’t. Didn’t I see it with my own eyes, and I was as wide awake as you are, and not caulking?’
“‘The sea sarpint!’ I repeated scornfully, laughing again in a way that made Gil wild. ‘Who ever heard tell of such a thing, except in a Yankee yarn?’
“‘And why shouldn’t there be a big snake in the sea the same as there are big snakes on land like the Bow constreetar, as is read of in books of history, Jim Newman? Some folks are so cocksure, that they won’t believe nothing but what they sees for themselves. I wonder who at home, now, would credit that there are some monkeys here in Afrikey that are bigger than a man and walk upright; and you yourself, Jim, have told me that when you were in Australy you seed rabbits that were more than ten foot high when they stood on their hind-legs, and that could jump a hundred yards at one leap.’
“‘So I have, Gil Saul,’ sez I, a bit nettled at what he said, and the way he said it, ‘and what I says I stick to. I have seen at Port Philip kangaroos, which are just like big rabbits with upright ears, as big as I’ve said; and I’ve seen ’em, too, jump more than twice the distance any horse could.’
“‘And why then,’ sez he, argumentifying on to me like a shot, ‘and why then shouldn’t there be such a thing as the sea sarpint?’
“This flummuxed me a bit, for I couldn’t find an answer handy, so I axed him another question to get out of my quandary.
“‘But why, Gil, did you say you had seed a ghost, when it was a sarpint?’
“This time he was bothered for a moment.
“‘Because, Jim,’ sez he, after a while, ‘it appeared so awful to me when I saw it coming out of the white mist with its glaring red eyes and terrible beak. It was a ghost I feels, if it wasn’t the sea sarpint; and whether or no it bodes no good to the man wot sees it, I know. I’m a doomed man.’
“I couldn’t shake him from that belief, though I thought the whole thing was fancy on his part, and I turned into my hammock soon after we got below, without a thought more about the matter—it didn’t stop my caulk, I know. But, ah! that was only in the early morning. Before the day was done, as Gil had said, that conversation was recalled to me in a terrible way—ah, a terrible way!” the old sailor repeated impressively, taking off his tarpaulin hat, and wiping his forehead with his handkerchief, as if the recollection of the past awed him even now. He looked so serious that I could not laugh, inclined as I was to ridicule any such story as that of the fabled sea serpent, which one looks for periodically as a transatlantic myth to crop up in dull seasons in the columns of American newspapers.