'But not yours, I hope.'
'I don't believe in ghosts,' said I, 'but I have faith in portents and presentiments and premonitions.'
He looked grave, and answered so had he, and was about to tell me something, then checked himself; I think his imagination was with his dead then, and that he could have told me of having received some warning of the loss that was to befall him.
'I am sorry,' said he, with a glance at the captain, who was on the weather side of the deck talking with his wife, 'that the sailor should have told Captain Burke the apparition was like him. These reports, if there's good faith in them, catch hold of a man's spirits. The captain's worried. We must avoid the subject in his presence.'
'I should not like to be told that I had appeared to a person,' said I.
'I don't know,' he exclaimed, 'whether sailors are more superstitious than others; they're thought to be so. They can plead good reasons. Last night, for example, was fuller of the mysterious and the spirit-like than any churchyard scene, however crumbling the church tower, however red the colour than of the moon with a streak of black cloud, like crape, above it. The superstitions of the sea are extraordinary, and some of them beautiful. The Ancient Mariner was a poet.'
'He talks like one in the poem,' said I, smiling.
'Coleridge went to the old sea chronicles for his ideas and imagery,' he exclaimed. 'Shelvocke gave him the albatross, and he found his painted ocean, and the shining and burning, wriggling things in it, in Richard Hawkins. We can never see again as the old saw. They came with the eyes of children and everything was marvellous. But many of the old superstitions linger.'
'Is there any particular superstition connected with apparitions at sea?'
'I am not well read in that subject,' he answered, laughing. 'Most of the apparitions I have heard about concern the coming on and ending of storms—mercurial spirits, spectres of the barometer. The old Jacks swore that the Virgin frequently appeared in the height of a gale; they had but to vow a taper and down dropped the wind. There was always a gale in the wake of the "Flying Dutchman."'