he was in the ocean depths miles to windward of our leeward drift, and
the likelihood was that he was already portioned out in the maws of many
sharks. Still, my mind pondered on the tales of the ghosts of dead men I
had heard, and I speculated on the spirit world. My conclusion was that
if the spirits of the dead still roamed the world they carried the
goodness or the malignancy of the earth-life with them. Therefore,
granting the hypothesis (which I didn't grant at all), the ghost of the
Bricklayer was bound to be as hateful and malignant as he in life had
been. But there wasn't any Bricklayer's ghost--that I insisted upon.

A few minutes, thinking thus, I paced up and down. Then, glancing
casually for'ard, along the port side, I leaped like a startled deer and
in a blind madness of terror rushed aft along the poop, heading for the
cabin. Gone was all my arrogance of youth and my intellectual calm. I
had seen a ghost. There, in the dim light, where we had flung the dead
man overboard, I had seen a faint and wavering form. Six-feet in length
it was, slender, and of substance so attenuated that I had distinctly
seen through it the tracery of the fore-rigging.

As for me, I was as panic-stricken as a frightened horse. I, as I, had
ceased to exist. Through me were vibrating the fibre-instincts of ten
thousand generations of superstitious forebears who had been afraid of
the dark and the things of the dark. I was not I. I was, in truth,
those ten thousand forebears. I was the race, the whole human race, in
its superstitious infancy. Not until part way down the
cabin-companionway did my identity return to me. I checked my flight and
clung to the steep ladder, suffocating, trembling, and dizzy. Never,
before nor since, have I had such a shock. I clung to the ladder and
considered. I could not doubt my senses. That I had seen something
there was no discussion. But what was it? Either a ghost or a joke.