“Good-morning, Fielding. The breeze has fallen slack. I am trying to make out the meaning of that little schooner down there;” and he pointed over the bow with his telescope. “Look for yourself.”
I leveled the glass, and beheld a schooner of about a hundred tons, rolling broadside to the sea, abandoned, or, if not abandoned, then helpless. Her jib boom was gone; so, too, was her fore topmast; otherwise she seemed sound enough, saving that for canvas she had nothing set but her gaff foresail, though, as I seemed to find, when I strained my gaze through the glass, her mainsail was not furled, but lay heaped upon the boom, as though the halliards had been let go and nothing more done.
“She’ll be worse off than the craft that Van Laar’s gone home in,” said I, returning the telescope to Greaves.
“Do you believe in dreams?” said he.
“Do not be in too great a hurry with your ‘noes,’” he exclaimed. “I like a man to reflect when he is asked a question in metaphysics.”
“I know nothing about metaphysics,” said I, “and I do not believe in dreams.”
“I believe in the unseen,” said he, putting down the glass, and folding his arms and leaning back against the rail, as though settling himself down for a talk or an argument. “The materialist tells you not to put your faith in anything you can’t see, or handle, or smell, that you can’t bring some organ or function of sense to bear upon, in short. Throw yourself down upon your back, and look straight up into the sky. What do you see? Hey? But do you see it? Yes. Do you understand it? No. It is visible, and yet it is the unseen; for at what does a man look when he gazes straight up into the sky?”
“There are few things worth going mad for,” said I, “and two things I am resolved shall never send me to Bedlam.”
“What are they?”