The Floating Light Of The Goodwin Sands

CHAPTER ONE.

PARTICULAR INQUIRIES.

A light--clear, ruddy and brilliant, like a huge carbuncle--uprose one
evening from the deep, and remained hovering about forty feet above the
surface, scattering its rays far and wide, over the Downs to Ramsgate
and Deal, along the coast towards Dover, away beyond the North Foreland,
across the Goodwin Sands, and far out upon the bosom of the great North
Sea.

It was a chill November evening, when this light arose, in the year--
well, it matters not what year. We have good reasons, reader, for
shrouding this point in mystery. It may have been recently; it may have
been "long, long ago." We don't intend to tell. It was not the first
time of that light's appearance, and it certainly was not the last. Let
it suffice that what we are about to relate did happen, sometime or
other within the present century.

Besides being cold, the evening in question was somewhat
stormy--"gusty," as was said of it by a traveller with a stern visage
and remarkably keen grey eyes, who entered the coffee-room of an hotel
which stood on the margin of Ramsgate harbour facing the sea, and from
the upper windows of which the light just mentioned was visible.

"It is, sir," said the waiter, in reply to the "gusty" observation,
stirring the fire while the traveller divested himself of his hat and
greatcoat.