until he reached from floor to ceiling and
from wall to wall; and then, at one o'clock in
the morning, he blew up with a loud explosion.
At the sound of it, all the milk-white horses in
the stables broke their halters and went mad,
and then they galloped over everybody in
Captain Murderer's house (beginning with the family
blacksmith who had filed his teeth) until the
whole were dead, and then they galloped away.

Hundreds of times did I hear this legend of
Captain Murderer, in my early youth, and added
hundreds of times was there a mental compulsion
upon me in bed, to peep in at his window
as the dark twin peeped, and to revisit his
horrible house, and look at him in his blue and
spotty and screaming stage, as he reached from
floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. The
young woman who brought me acquainted with
Captain Murderer, had a fiendish enjoyment of
my terrors, and used to begin, I remember—as a
sort of introductory overture—by clawing the air
with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow
groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony
in combination with this infernal Captain,
that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was
hardly strong enough and old enough to hear
the story again just yet. But she never spared
me one word of it, and indeed commended the
awful chalice to my lips as the only preservative
known to science against "The Black Cat"—
a weird and glaring-eyed supernatural Tom,
who was reputed to prowl about the world by
night, sucking the breath of infancy, and who
was endowed with a special thirst (as I was given
to understand) for mine.

This female bard—may she have been repaid
my debt of obligation to her in the matter of
nightmares and perspirations!—reappears in my
memory as the daughter of a shipwright. Her
name was Mercy, though she had none on me.
There was something of a ship-building flavour
in the following story. As it always recurs to
me in a vague association with calomel pills, I
believe it to have been reserved for dull nights
when I was low with medicine.

There was once a shipwright, and he wrought
in a Government Yard, and his name was Chips.
And his father's name before him was Chips, and
his father's name before him was Chips, and
they were all Chipses. And Chips the father
had sold himself to the Devil for an iron pot
and a bushel of tenpenny nails and half a ton of
copper and a rat that could speak; and Chips
the grandfather had sold himself to the Devil
for an iron pot and a bushel of tenpenny nails
and half a ton of copper and a rat that could
speak; and Chips the great-grandfather had
disposed of himself in the same direction on the
same terms; and the bargain had run in the
family for a long long time. So one day when
young Chips was at work in the Dock Slip all
alone, down in the dark hold of an old Seventy-
four that was hauled up for repairs, the Devil
presented himself, and remarked:

"A Lemon has pips,
And a Yard has ships,
And I'll have Chips!"

(I don't know why, but this fact of the Devil's
expressing himself in rhyme was peculiarly
trying to me.) Chips looked up when he heard
the words, and there he saw the Devil with
saucer eyes that squinted on a terrible great
scale, and that struck out sparks of blue fire
continually. And whenever he winked his eyes,
showers of blue sparks came out, and his
eyelashes made a clattering like flints and steels
striking lights. And hanging over one of his
arms by the handle was an iron pot, and under
that arm was a bushel of tenpenny nails, and
under his other arm was half a ton of copper, and
sitting on one of his shoulders was a rat that
could speak. So the Devil said again:

"A Lemon has pips,
And a Yard has ships,
And I'll have Chips!"

(The invariable effect of this alarming
tautology on the part of the Evil Spirit was to
deprive me of my senses for some moments.) So
Chips answered never a word, but went on with
his work. "What are you doing, Chips?" said
the rat that could speak. "I am putting in new
planks where you and your gang have eaten old
away," said Chips. "But we'll eat them too,"
said the rat that could speak; "and we'll let in
the water, and we'll drown the crew, and we'll
eat them too." Chips, being only a shipwright,
and not a Man-of-war's man, said, "You are
welcome to it." But he couldn't keep his eyes
off the half a ton of copper or the bushel of
tenpenny nails; for nails and copper are a
shipwright's sweethearts, and shipwrights will run
away with them whenever they can. So the
Devil said, "I see what you are looking at,
Chips. You had better strike the bargain. You
know the terms. Your father before you was
well acquainted with them, and so were your
grandfather and great-grandfather before him."
Says Chips, "I like the copper, and I like the
nails, and I don't mind the pot, but I don't like
the rat." Says the Devil, fiercely, "You can't
have the metal without him—and he's a curiosity.
I'm going." Chips, afraid of losing the half a ton
of copper and the bushel of nails, then said,
"Give us hold!" So he got the copper and the
nails and the pot and the rat that could speak,
and the Devil vanished.

Chips sold the copper, and he sold the nails,
and he would have sold the pot; but whenever he
offered it for sale, the rat was in it, and the dealers
dropped it, and would have nothing to say to
the bargain. So Chips resolved to kill the rat,
and, being at work in the Yard one day with a
great kettle of hot pitch on one side of him and
the iron pot with the rat in it on the other, he
turned the scalding pitch into the pot, and filled
it full. Then he kept his eye upon it till it
cooled and hardened, and then he let it stand for
twenty days, and then he heated the pitch again
and turned it back into the kettle, and then he
sank the pot in water for twenty days more, and
then he got the smelters to put it in the furnace
for twenty days more, and then they gave it him
out, red hot, and looking like red-hot glass