and leave there, wet and flapping--a man with round, fixed, fishy
eyes, and soft, slaty skin.

But the horror of the thing were the two gills that swelled and
relaxed spasmodically, emitting a rasping, purring sound--two gasping,
blood-red gills, all fluted and scolloped and distended.

Frozen with amazement and repugnance, I stared at the creature; I felt
the hair stirring on my head and the icy sweat on my forehead.

"It's the harbor-master!" screamed Halyard.

The harbor-master had gathered himself into a wet lump, squatting
motionless in the bows under the mast; his lidless eyes were
phosphorescent, like the eyes of living codfish. After a while I felt
that either fright or disgust was going to strangle me where I sat,
but it was only the arms of the pretty nurse clasped around me in a
frenzy of terror.

There was not a fire-arm aboard that we could get at. Halyard's hand
crept backward where a steel-shod boat-hook lay, and I also made a
clutch at it. The next moment I had it in my hand, and staggered
forward, but the boat was already tumbling shoreward among the
breakers, and the next I knew the harbor-master ran at me like a
colossal rat, just as the boat rolled over and over through the surf,
spilling freight and passengers among the sea-weed-covered rocks.

When I came to myself I was thrashing about knee-deep in a rocky pool,
blinded by the water and half suffocated, while under my feet, like a
stranded porpoise, the harbor-master made the water boil in his