"'Have you got a fish t' trade?' said the skipper.
"'Good-evenin', skipper, sir,' said the queer customer, after a last kick and flourish. 'I've a quintal or two an' a cask o' oil that I'm wantin' bad t' trade away.'
"He was rational as you please; so the skipper was thrown off his guard, took him aboard, and pulled out.
"'You're quite a dancer,' said he.
"'Hut!' said the man. 'That's nothin' at all. When the moon's full an' high, sir, I dances over the waves; an' when they's a gale blowin' I goes aloft t' the clouds an' shakes a foot up there.'
"'Do you, now?' said the skipper, not knowing whether to take this in joke or earnest.
"'Believe me, sir,' said the man, with the gravest of faces, 'I'm a wonderful dancer.'
"I was on deck when they came aboard. It was then dusk. I noticed nothing out of the ordinary in my customer's appearance. He was a large, big-boned man, well supplied with fat and muscle, and capable, as I thought at the moment, of enduring all the toil and hardship to which the men of that coast are exposed. The skipper handed him over to me without a word of warning, and went below to the forecastle, for the wind was blowing cold and misty."
"Oh, well," the skipper broke in from his place in a bunk, "how could I tell that he was mad?"