"That dog, I shouldn't like to lose him," said the Skipper, stroking his beard. "There's no luck in that. I shot a dog once on a ship; and first we ran into a blow and lost a lot of gear, and then the mate got his hand smashed, and then everything got cross-grained till I'd have paid, ah, fifty pounds to have had the brute back again, and an ugly customer he was. Ah, you can smile, Doctor, but there it is. I'm not superstitious and never was. But you can't tell me. Look at the things that happen. When I was a youngster, my ship was off Rio, and I dreamt my father was dead. I took my bearings and the time. I dreamt my father died in a red brick house with a laylock tree by the door and that tree was in blossom plain enough to smell. I didn't know the house. There was a path of clean red bricks leading up to the porch, through a garden. I didn't see my father. But you know what dreams are like--no sense in them--there the house was and not a soul in sight. I knew he was dying inside it."
"How do you account for that? Have you got it down in your books? I lay you haven't. I forgot all about that dream. Long after I was at Cape Town and met my brother. That reminded me. After a bit I said to him, 'Father's dead.' 'Yes,' he said, 'but how did you know?' Said I, 'Was the house like this?' and I told him. 'Yes,' he said, 'it was like that. A place he was staying at in Essex. But how did you know?' I didn't tell him. What's the good? He wouldn't have believed it. People don't."
All through the anxious time when we were being soused and buffeted I noticed how our company, every man of them, even the Pyrrhonist, saw omens in all the chance variety of the vast menace under the frown of which we huddled in our iron box; porpoises alongside; one of Mother Cary's dark brood accompanying us, glancing about the vagaries of the flowing hills with swift precision; the form of a cloud; a loom far out, as though day were there at least. The fall of a portrait in the Chief's room once set him wondering and melancholy. Again, when the dog whined and moped, the Skipper eyed the animal narrowly, as though the creature had prescience but could tell us what it knew only by drooping and quivering its hind quarters. You might have thought that Fate, dumb and cruel, but a little relenting for something inevitably to come to our mishap, were trying to stretch a point, and so induced the Skipper to put his shirt on inside out one morning, after dreaming he saw drowned rats, in case the horse were not too blind to see both the nod and the wink.