oating, haphazard, with their
crews all dead? I looked at the seaman at the helm, I had an impulse to
speak to him, and, indeed, his face took on an expectant cast as if he
had guessed my intention. But in the end I went below, thinking I
would be alone with the greatness of my trouble for a little while.
But through his open door Mr. Burns saw me come down, and addressed me
grumpily: "Well, sir?"

I went in. "It isn't well at all," I said.

Mr. Burns, reestablished in his bed-place, was concealing his hirsute
cheek in the palm of his hand.

"That confounded fellow has taken away the scissors from me," were the
next words he said.

The tension I was suffering from was so great that it was perhaps just
as well that Mr. Burns had started on his grievance. He seemed very sore
about it and grumbled, "Does he think I am mad, or what?"

"I don't think so, Mr. Burns," I said. I looked upon him at that moment
as a model of self-possession. I even conceived on that account a sort of
admiration for that man, who had (apart from the intense materiality of
what was left of his beard) come as near to being a disembodied spirit
as any man can do and live. I noticed the preternatural sharpness of the
ridge of his nose, the deep cavities of his temples, and I envied him.
He was so reduced that he would probably die very soon. Enviable man!
So near extinction--while I had to bear within me a tumult of suffering
vitality, doubt, confusion, self-reproach, and an indefinite reluctance
to meet the horrid logic of the situation. I could not help muttering:
"I feel as if I were going mad myself."

Mr. Burns glared spectrally, but otherwise was wonderfully composed.

"I always thought he would play us some deadly trick," he said, with a
peculiar emphasis on the _he_.

It gave me a mental shock, but I had neither the mind, nor the heart,
nor the spirit to argue with him. My form of sickness was indifference.
The creeping paralysis of a hopeless outlook. So I only gazed at him.
Mr. Burns broke into further speech.

"Eh! What! No! You won't believe it? Well, how do you account for this?
How do you think it could have happened?"

"Happened?" I repeated dully. "Why, yes, how in the name of the infernal
powers did this thing happen?"

Indeed, on thinking it out, it seemed incomprehensible that it should
just be like this: the bottles emptied, refilled, rewrapped, and
replaced. A sort of plot, a sinister attempt to deceive, a thing
rese