falling into the ears of his dark head bowed on his chest.

"I have been at sea now, man and boy, for seven-and-thirty years,
and I've never heard of such a thing happening in an English ship.
And that it should be my ship. Wife on board, too."

I was hardly listening to him.

"Don't you think," I said, "that the heavy sea which, you told me,
came aboard just then might have killed the man? I have seen the
sheer weight of a sea kill a man very neatly, by simply breaking
his neck."

"Good God!" he uttered, impressively, fixing his smeary blue eyes
on me. "The sea! No man killed by the sea ever looked like that."
He seemed positively scandalised at my suggestion. And as I gazed
at him, certainly not prepared for anything original on his part,
he advanced his head close to mine and thrust his tongue out at me
so suddenly that I couldn't help starting back.

After scoring over my calmness in this graphic way he nodded
wisely. If I had seen the sight, he assured me, I would never
forget it as long as I lived. The weather was too bad to give the
corpse a proper sea burial. So next day at dawn they took it up on
the poop, covering its face with a bit of bunting; he read a short
prayer, and then, just as it was, in its oilskins and long boots,
they launched it amongst those mountainous seas that seemed ready
every moment to swallow up the ship herself and the terrified lives
on board of her.