I Have Spoken Lightly Of Courage, As If, By Implication, I
Myself Possessed It.
Let me make a confession.
From my soul
I pity the man who is or has been such a miserable coward as
I was in my infancy, and up to this youthful period of my
life. No fear of bullets or bayonets could ever equal mine.
It was the fear of ghosts. As a child, I think that at times
when shut up for punishment, in a dark cellar for instance, I
must have nearly gone out of my mind with this appalling
terror.
Once when we were lying just below Whampo, the captain took
nearly every officer and nearly the whole ship's crew on a
punitive expedition up the Canton river. They were away
about a week. I was left behind, dangerously ill with fever
and ague. In his absence, Sir Thomas had had me put into his
cabin, where I lay quite alone day and night, seeing hardly
anyone save the surgeon and the captain's steward, who was
himself a shadow, pretty nigh. Never shall I forget my
mental sufferings at night. In vain may one attempt to
describe what one then goes through; only the victims know
what that is. My ghost - the ghost of the Whampo Reach - the
ghost of those sultry and miasmal nights, had no shape, no
vaporous form; it was nothing but a presence, a vague
amorphous dread. It may have floated with the swollen and
putrid corpses which hourly came bobbing down the stream, but
it never appeared; for there was nothing to appear.
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