“Douse the light!” roared the hoarse voice from the water.  “No one wants light here!”

“Thunder and lightning!” exclaimed the veteran; “back to the house with you!”

Wolfert and his companions shrunk back is dismay.  Still their curiosity would not allow them entirely to withdraw.  A long sheet of lightning now flickered across the waves, and discovered a boat, filled with men, just under a rocky point, rising and sinking with the heavy surges, and swashing the water at every heave.  It was with difficulty held to the rocks by a boat hook, for the current rushed furiously round the point.  The veteran hoisted one end of the lumbering sea-chest on the gunwale of the boat; he seized the handle at the other end to lift it in, when the motion propelled the boat from the shore; the chest slipped off from the gunwale, sunk into the waves, and pulled the veteran headlong after it.  A loud shriek was uttered by all on shore, and a volley of execrations by those on board; but boat and man were hurried away by the rushing swiftness of the tide.  A pitchy darkness succeeded; Wolfert Webber indeed fancied that He distinguished a cry for help, and that he beheld the drowning man beckoning for assistance; but when the lightning again gleamed along the water all was drear and void.  Neither man nor boat was to be seen; nothing but the dashing and weltering of the waves as they hurried past.

The company returned to the tavern, for they could not leave it before the storm should subside.  They resumed their seats and gazed on each other with dismay.  The whole transaction had not occupied five minutes and not a dozen words had been spoken.  When they looked at the oaken chair they could scarcely realize the fact that the strange being who had so lately tenanted it, full of life and Herculean vigor, should already be a corpse.  There was the very glass he had just drunk from; there lay the ashes from the pipe which he had smoked as it were with his last breath.  As the worthy burghers pondered on these things, they felt a terrible conviction of the uncertainty of human existence, and each felt as if the ground on which he stood was rendered less stable by this awful example.

As, however, the most of the company were possessed of that valuable philosophy which enables a man to bear up with fortitude against the misfortunes of his neighbors, they soon managed to console themselves for the tragic end of the veteran.  The landlord was happy that the poor dear man had paid his reckoning before he went.

“He came in a storm, and he went in a storm; he came in the night, and he went in the night; he came nobody knows from whence, and he has gone nobody knows where.  For aught I know he has gone to sea once more on his chest and may land to bother some people on the other side of the world!  Though it’s a thousand pities,” added the landlord, “if he has gone to Davy Jones that he had not left his sea-chest behind him.”