“Corrie,” said Jo Bumpus, solemnly, with a troubled expression on his grave face: “I’ve heer’d a-many a cry in this life, both ashore and afloat; but, since I was half as long as a marline-spike, I’ve never heer’d the likes o’ that there screech nowhere.”

 

At any other time the boy would have expressed a doubt as to the possibility of the Grampus having, at any period of his existence, been so short as “half the length of a marline-spike;” but, being very imaginative by nature, and having been encouraged to believe in ghosts by education, he was too frightened to be funny. With a face that might very well have passed for that of a ghost, and a very pale ghost too, he said, in a tremulous voice—

 

“Oh! dear Bumpus, what shall we do?”

 

“Dun know,” replied Jo, very sternly; for the stout mariner also believed in ghosts, as a matter of course, (although he would not admit it), and, being a man of iron mould and powerful will, there was at that moment going on within his capacious breast, a terrific struggle between natural courage and supernatural cowardice.

 

“Let’s go back,” whispered Corrie. “I know another pass over the hills. It’s a longer one, to be sure; but we can run, you know, to make for—”

 

He was struck dumb and motionless at this point by the recurrence of the dreadful howling, louder than ever, as poor Poopy’s despair deepened.

 

“Don’t speak to me, boy,” said Bumpus, still more sternly, while a cold sweat stood in large beads on his pale forehead. “Here’s wot I calls somethin’ new, an’ it becomes a man, specially a British seaman, d’ye see, to inquire into new things in a reasonable sort of way.”

 

Jo caught his breath, and clutched the rock beside him powerfully, as he continued—

 

“It ain’t a ghost, in course; it can’t be that. Cause why? there’s no sich a thing as a ghost—”

 

“Ain’t there?” whispered Corrie, hopefully.

 

The hideous yell that Poopy here set up, seemed to give the lie direct to the sceptical seaman; but he went on deliberately, though with a glazed eye, and a death-like pallor on his face—

 

“No; there ain’t no ghosts—never wos, an’ never will be. All ghosts is sciencrific dolusions, nothing more; and it’s only the hignorant an’ supercilious as b’lieves in ’em. I don’t; an’, wots more,” added Jo, with tremendous decision, “I won’t!”

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