Edinburgh, 1870.
Chapter One.
Particular Inquiries.
A light—clear, ruddy and brilliant, like a huge carbuncle—uprose one evening from the deep, and remained hovering about forty feet above the surface, scattering its rays far and wide, over the Downs to Ramsgate and Deal, along the coast towards Dover, away beyond the North Foreland, across the Goodwin Sands, and far out upon the bosom of the great North Sea.
It was a chill November evening, when this light arose, in the year—well, it matters not what year. We have good reasons, reader, for shrouding this point in mystery. It may have been recently; it may have been “long, long ago.” We don’t intend to tell. It was not the first time of that light’s appearance, and it certainly was not the last. Let it suffice that what we are about to relate did happen, sometime or other within the present century.
Besides being cold, the evening in question was somewhat stormy—“gusty,” as was said of it by a traveller with a stern visage and remarkably keen grey eyes, who entered the coffee-room of an hotel which stood on the margin of Ramsgate harbour facing the sea, and from the upper windows of which the light just mentioned was visible.
“It is, sir,” said the waiter, in reply to the “gusty” observation, stirring the fire while the traveller divested himself of his hat and greatcoat.
“Think it’s going to blow hard?” inquired the traveller, planting himself firmly on the hearth-rug, with his back to the fire, and his thumbs hooked into the armholes of his waistcoat.