from which I had come was but a spot of light upon the ring’s curvature.  And the thing that the hand gripped had the likeness of a black rod.  Through a long eternity I watched this Hand, with the ring and the rod, marvelling and fearing and waiting helplessly on what might follow.  It seemed as though nothing could follow:  that I should watch for ever, seeing only the Hand and the thing it held, and understanding nothing of its import.  Was the whole universe but a refracting speck upon some greater Being?  Were our worlds but the atoms of another universe, and those again of another, and so on through an endless progression?  And what was I?  Was I indeed immaterial?  A vague persuasion of a body gathering about me came into my suspense.  The abysmal darkness about the Hand filled with impalpable suggestions, with uncertain, fluctuating shapes.

Then, suddenly, came a sound, like the sound of a tolling bell:  faint, as if infinitely far; muffled, as though heard through thick swathings of darkness:  a deep, vibrating resonance, with vast gulfs of silence between each stroke.  And the Hand appeared to tighten on the rod.  And I saw far above the Hand, towards the apex of the darkness, a circle of dim phosphorescence, a ghostly sphere whence these sounds came throbbing; and at the last stroke the Hand vanished, for the hour had come, and I heard a noise of many waters.  But the black rod remained as a great band across the sky.  And then a voice, which seemed to run to the uttermost parts of space, spoke, saying, “There will be no more pain.”

At that an almost intolerable gladness and radiance rushed in upon me, and I saw the circle shining white and bright, and the rod black and shining, and many things else distinct and clear.  And the circle was the face of the clock, and the rod the rail of my bed.  Haddon was standing at the foot, against the rail, with a small pair of scissors on his fingers; and the hands of my clock on the mantel over his shoulder were clasped together over the hour of twelve.  Mowbray was washing something in a basin at the octagonal table, and at my side I felt a subdued feeling that could scarce be spoken of as pain.

The operation had not killed me.  And I perceived, suddenly, that the dull melancholy of half a year was lifted from my mind.

  XIII.

  THE SEA RAIDERS.

I.

Until the extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar species Haploteuthis ferox was known to science only generically, on the strength of a half-digested tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a decaying body pecked by birds and nibbled by fish, found early in 1896 by Mr. Jennings, near Land’s End.