And more. Still imagining that some practical joker was at work, Mead brought a big stick with him on his watch. This was no remedy. The ghost appeared again, at much the same hour, on several nights; it was remarked, mostly when the apprentice who first saw it had the wheel. Trying to stop so strange a bell-ringer, Mead was met by a sharp flap of wind, from a dead still night, and the glimmering shadow was gone to the air. All this happened north of the line.
This was Mead's story, but the boy's seemed to support it; and when in the shadows of the bridge deck, earnestly and without trimming, he told it me, it seemed very true. I glanced about me occasionally after hearing it.
The wind continued, but the heat was becoming intense. Painting went on like the wind. The derricks received a terra-cotta coat and their trellis work looked an amenity, against the general whiteness. The fervour for redecoration even affected me: was not my hutch to share the common lot? But, though the walls needed it, the matter was postponed, on account of the limited accommodation.
The newspaper was to appear again, but its circulation was being cut down. One copy only would now have to serve the public. It was passed to me, and my aid with paragraphs requested. I could not regret the reduction made in the number, even though if that one copy was lost,
We knew not where was that Promethean torch That could its light relumine.
Bicker, the editor, instead of reviewing his admired literature in his journal, lengthened breakfast by doing so there _viva voce_. He was all for Boeotian situations, and, on occasion, his cold re-dishing was tactfully ended by a relief conversation on religion, the keynote of which was in the unironically meant remark: "He was darned religious, but he was a darned good man." I began to know a certain captain, from talk during the voyage, almost by sight; one who "went in for Sunday Schools, and put on a crown of glory as soon as he reached Wales," but once away again, it appears that "he fell."
Another matter for the columns of the _Optimist_ was obtruded upon the breakfast table. It was a conundrum:
West was the wind, and West steered we, West was the land. How could that be?