Part 24

But all this will not do. Vanderdecken is no nobleman. There was a time when I was disposed to regard him as the Wandering Jew, who, having grown sick of marching about the world, had taken ship for a cruise that, though it lasted several centuries, would be short in comparison with the time his grand tour would occupy. The idea possessed me on hearing of a book entitled “News from Holland,” in High Dutch, printed at Amsterdam in 1647, in which is unfolded the story of two contemporaries of Pontius Pilate, one a Jew, the other a Gentile, both then alive. But it is not to be supposed that the Wandering Jew, whose name was Cartaphilus, and who was keeper of the Judgment Hall in Jerusalem, would voluntarily accept an obligation so naturally obnoxious to the hydrophobic soul of the Asiatic as must be involved in many centuries of trying to get to windward of the Cape. Yet if he be not the Wandering Jew, or Falkenberg, or Fokke, or Klaboteeman, whose ship, according to Longfellow, is called the _Carmilhan_, or Captain Requiem, of the _Libera Nos_, or Washington Irving’s Ramhout van Dam, who _is_ Vanderdecken?

THE END.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.

● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

End of Project Gutenberg's A Book for the Hammock, by William Clark Russell