looking about. One landsman and two boatmen were seated on the
settle, smoking pipes and drinking beer out of thick pint crockery
mugs - mugs peculiar to such places, with parti-coloured rings
round them, and ornaments between the rings like frayed-out roots.
The landsman was relating his experience, as yet only three nights
old, of a fearful running-down case in the Channel, and therein
presented to my imagination a sound of music that it will not soon
forget.

'At that identical moment of time,' said he (he was a prosy man by
nature, who rose with his subject), 'the night being light and
calm, but with a grey mist upon the water that didn't seem to
spread for more than two or three mile, I was walking up and down
the wooden causeway next the pier, off where it happened, along
with a friend of mine, which his name is Mr. Clocker. Mr. Clocker
is a grocer over yonder.' (From the direction in which he pointed
the bowl of his pipe, I might have judged Mr. Clocker to be a
merman, established in the grocery trade in five-and-twenty fathoms
of water.) 'We were smoking our pipes, and walking up and down the
causeway, talking of one thing and talking of another. We were
quite alone there, except that a few hovellers' (the Kentish name
for 'long-shore boatmen like his companions) 'were hanging about
their lugs, waiting while the tide made, as hovellers will.' (One
of the two boatmen, thoughtfully regarding me, shut up one eye;
this I understood to mean: first, that he took me into the
conversation: secondly, that he confirmed the proposition: thirdly,
that he announced himself as a hoveller.) 'All of a sudden Mr.
Clocker and me stood rooted to the spot, by hearing a sound come
through the stillness, right over the sea, LIKE A GREAT SORROWFUL
FLUTE OR AEOLIAN HARP. We didn't in the least know what it was,