They played hide-and-seek with one another and with the
innumerable meteors which shot recklessly every now and again across the
field of the firmament, leaving momentary furrows of light behind them.
Beneath, the sea sparkled almost like the sky, for every turn of the
screw churned up the scintillating phosphorescence in the water, so that
countless little jets of living fire seemed to flash and die away at the
summit of every wavelet. A tall, spare man in a picturesque cloak, and
with long, lank, white hair, leant over the taffrail, gazing at the
numberless flashing lights of the surface. As he gazed, he talked on in
his clear, rapt voice to a stranger by his side. The voice and the ring
of enthusiasm were unmistakable. "Oh, no," he was saying, as we stole up
behind him, "that hypothesis, I venture to assert, is no longer tenable
by the light of recent researches. Death and decay have nothing to do
directly with the phosphorescence of the sea, though they have a little
indirectly. The light is due in the main to numerous minute living
organisms, most of them bacilli, on which I once made several close
observations and crucial experiments.
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