upported by iron
pins, that pierced through stanchions in such a manner that the table
could at will be raised to the ceiling, and there left for the
conveniency of space.

At this table, seated upon short quaintly-wrought benches, and
immediately facing each other, were two men. They were incomparably more
lifelike than the frozen figures. The one whose back was upon the
hatchway ladder, being the man whose face I had stroked, sat upright, in
the posture of a person about to start up, both hands upon the rim of
the table, and his countenance raised as if, in a sudden terror and
agony of death, he had darted a look to God. So inimitably expressive of
life was his attitude, that though I knew him to be a frozen body as
perished as if he had died with Adam or Noah, I was sensible of a
breathless wonder in me that the affrighted start with which he seemed
to be rising from the table was not continued--that, in short, he did
not spring to his feet with the cry that you seemed to _hear_ in his
posture.

The other figure lay over the table with his face buried in his arms. He
wore no covering to his head, which was bald, yet his hair on either
side was plentiful and lay upon his arms, and his beard fluffing up
about his buried face gave him an uncommon shaggy appearance. The other
had on a round fur cap with lappets for the ears. His body was muffled
in a thick ash-coloured coat; his hair was also abundant, curling long
and black down his back; his cheeks were smooth manifestly through
nature rather than the razor, and the ends of a small black mustache
were twisted up to his eyes. These were the only occupants of the cabin,
which their presence rendered terribly ghastly and strange.

There was perhaps something in keeping with the icy spell of death upon
this vessel in the figure of the man who was bowed over the table, for
he looked as though he slept; but the other mocked the view with a
_spectrum_ of the fever and passion of life. You would have sworn he
had beheld the skeleton hand of the Shadow reaching out of the dimness
for him; that he had started back with a curse and cry of horror, and
expired in the very agony of his affrighted recoil.

The interior was extremely plain: the bulkheads of a mahogany colour,
the decks bare, and nothing in the form of an ornament saving a silver
crucifix hanging by a nail to the trunk of the mainmast, and a cage with
a frozen bird of gorgeous plumage suspended to the bulkhead near