Bentley's Miscellany, Volume I

by Various

The Honourable Captain Fitzroy Fitzalban slept late on the succeeding morning. He had been called at daylight, pro forma, but had merely turned from his left side to the right, muttering something about a cow. It must be supposed that the slumbers of the morning indemnified him for the horrors of the night, for breakfast was on the table, and the usual guests assembled, when the captain emerged from the after-cabin.

There was no occasion to ask the pale and trembling steward if the cow had given any milk that morning.

The breakfast remained untouched by the captain, and passed off in active silence by his guests. Not wishing to excite more of the derision of Jack than was absolutely necessary, the Honourable the Captain Augustus Fitzroy Fitzalban, when he found that the various officers whom he had invited to breakfast had sufficiently "improved the occasion," as the methodists say, turned to the first lieutenant, who was again his guest, and asked him if nothing had transpired on the over-night to warrant a suspicion as to the lacteal felony.

The first luff looked very mysterious, and not wholly disposed to be communicative upon the subject. He had been piously brought up, and was not at all inclined to be sarcastic upon the score of visions or the visited of ghosts; yet, at the same time, he did not wish to subject himself to the ridicule of his captain, who had rationally enough postponed his belief in apparitions until he had seen one. Under these difficulties, he replied hesitatingly, that a ghost had been reported as having "come on board before daylight in the morning, without leave."

"A ghost, Mr. Mitchell, come on board, and I not called!" said the indignant captain: "By G—, sir, I would have turned out a guard of honour to have received him! I would have sooner had a visit from his spirituality than from his Excellency the Spanish Ambassador.—The service, sir, has come to a pretty pass, when a ghost can come on board, and leave the ship too, I presume, without even so much as the boatswain to pipe the side. So the ghost came, I suppose, and milked my cow?"

The first lieutenant, in answer, spoke with all manner of humility. He represented that he had been educated as a seaman and as an officer, and not for a doctor of divinity; therefore he could not pretend to account for these preternatural visitations. He could only state the fact, and that not so well as the first lieutenant of marines. "He begged, therefore, to refer to him."

That officer was immediately sent for, and he made his appearance accompanied by one of the serjeants, and then it was asserted that, when the guard went round to relieve the sentries, they found the man who had been stationed over the cow, lying on the deck senseless in a fit, and his bayonet could nowhere be found. When by the means of one of the assistant-surgeons, who had been immediately summoned, he had been sufficiently recovered to articulate, all the explanation they could get from him was, that he had seen a ghost; and the very mention of the fact, so great was his terror, had almost caused a relapse.

"Send the poltroon here immediately: I'll ghost him!" cried the enraged captain. In answer to this he was informed, that the man lay seriously ill in his hammock in the sick-bay, and that the doctor was at that very moment with the patient.

"I'll see him myself," said the captain.

As the honourable captain, with his cortège of officers, passed along the decks on his way to the sick-bay, he thought—or his sense of hearing most grievously deceived him—that more than once he heard sneering and gibing voices exclaim, "Who milked my cow?" but the moment he turned his head in the direction from whence the sounds proceeded, he saw nothing but visages the most sanctimonious: indeed they, instead of the unfortunate sentry, appeared to have seen the ghost. The captain's amiability that morning might have been expressed by the algebraical term—minus a cipher.