survives to tell the tale. Woe to the man who is found nigh them at
midnight when the tide has subsided, and they arise in their former
beauty, with forecastle, and deck, and sail, and pennon, and shroud! Then
is seen the streaming of lights along the water from their cabin windows,
and then is heard the sound of mirth and the clamour of tongues, and the
infernal whoop and halloo and song, ringing far and wide. Woe to the man
who comes nigh them!"

To all this my Allanbay companion listened with a breathless attention. I
felt something touched with a superstition to which I partly believed I
had seen one victim offered up; and I inquired of the old mariner, "How
and when came these Haunted Ships there? To me they seem but the
melancholy relics of some unhappy voyagers, and much more likely to warn
people to shun destruction than entice and delude them to it."

"And so," said the old man with a smile, which had more of sorrow in it
than of mirth; "and so, young man, these black and shattered hulks seem
to the eye of the multitude. But things are not what they seem: that
water, a kind and convenient servant to the wants of man, which seems so
smooth and so dimpling and so gentle, has swallowed up a human soul even
now; and the place which it covers, so fair and so level, is a faithless
quicksand, out of which none escape. Things are otherwise than they
seem. Had you lived as long as I have had the sorrow to live; had you
seen the storms, and braved the perils, and endured the distresses which
have befallen me; had you sat gazing out on the dreary ocean at midnight
on a haunted coast; had you seen comrade after comrade, brother after
brother, and son after son, swept away by the merciless ocean from your
very side; had you seen the shapes of friends, doomed to the wave and the
quicksand, appearing to you in the dreams and visions of the night, then
would your mind have been prepared for crediting the maritime legends of