As he drank it he told me that he had met men who had spoken against
wine, and that they had mentioned Heaven; and therefore he would not
go there--no, not he; and that once he had sent one of them to Hell,
but when he got there he would turn him out, and he had no use for
milksops.

Over the second tumbler he was thoughtful, but still he said no word
of the tale he knew, until I feared that it would never be heard. But
when the third glass of that terrific wine had burned its way down his
gullet, and vindicated the wickedness of the gnomes, his reticence
withered like a leaf in the fire, and he bellowed out the secret.

I had long known that there is in ships a will or way of their own,
and had even suspected that when sailors die or abandon their ships at
sea, a derelict, being left to her own devices, may seek her own ends;
but I had never dreamed by night, or fancied during the day, that the
ships had a god that they worshipped, or that they secretly slipped
away to a temple in the sea.

Over the fourth glass of the wine that the gnomes so sinfully brew but
have kept so wisely from man, until the bargain that I had with their
elders all through that autumn night, the sailor told me the story. I
do not tell it as he told it to me because of the oaths that were in
it; nor is it from delicacy that I refrain from writing these oaths
verbatim, but merely because the horror they caused in me at the time
troubles me still whenever I put them on paper, and I continue to
shudder until I have blotted them out. Therefore, I tell the story in
my own words, which, if they possess a certain decency that was not in
the mouth of that sailor, unfortunately do not smack, as his did, of
rum and blood and the sea.