No More Learning

It is a
hard thing, age to be coming on me, and I not to get the chance of
doing a robbery that would enable me to live quiet and honest to the
end of my lifetime.

_First Sailor. _ We are out since the new moon. What is worse again, it
is the way we are in a ship, the barrels empty and my throat shrivelled
with drought, and nothing to quench it but water only.

_Forgael_ [_in his sleep_]. Yes; there, there; that hair that is the
colour of burning.

_First Sailor. _ Listen to him now, calling out in his sleep.

_Forgael_ [_in his sleep_]. That pale forehead, that hair the colour of
burning.

_First Sailor. _ Some crazy dream he is in, and believe me it is no
crazier than the thought he has waking. He is not the first that has
had the wits drawn out from him through shadows and fantasies.

_Second Sailor. _ That is what ails him.
I have been thinking it this
good while.

_First Sailor. _ Do you remember that galley we sank at the time of the
full moon?

_Second Sailor. _ I do. We were becalmed the same night, and he sat up
there playing that old harp of his until the moon had set.

_First Sailor. _ I was sleeping up there by the bulwark, and when I woke
in the sound of the harp a change came over my eyes, and I could see
very strange things. The dead were floating upon the sea yet, and it
seemed as if the life that went out of every one of them had turned to
the shape of a man-headed bird--grey they were, and they rose up of a
sudden and called out with voices like our own, and flew away singing
to the west. Words like this they were singing: 'Happiness beyond
measure, happiness where the sun dies. '

_Second Sailor. _ I understand well what they are doing. My mother
used to be talking of birds of the sort. They are sent by the lasting
watchers to lead men away from this world and its women to some place
of shining women that cast no shadow, having lived before the making of
the earth. But I have no mind to go following him to that place.

_First Sailor.