nd asked me to bring the lanthorn
close.

"Ha!" cried he, "this was Mendoza's--the captain's. I remember; he took
it for the sake of this letter upon it. He lies dead on the rocks? We
missed him, but did not know where he had gone."

Then, raising his hand and impulsively starting upon the mattress, he
cried, whilst he tapped his forehead, "It has come back! I have it!
Guiseppe Trentanove and I were in the cabin; he had fallen blind with
the glare of the ice--if that was it. We confronted each other. On a
sudden he screamed out. I had put my face into my arms, and felt myself
dying. His cry aroused me. I looked up, and saw him leaning back from
the table with his eyes fixed and horror in his countenance. I was too
feeble to speak--too languid to rise. I watched him awhile, and then the
drowsiness stole over me again, and my head sank, and I remember no
more."

He shuddered, and extended the pannikin for more liquor. I filled it
with two-thirds of brandy and the rest water, and he supped it down as
if it had been a thimbleful of wine.

"By the holy cross," cried he, "but this is very wonderful, though. How
long have you been here, sir?"

"Three days."

"Three days! and I have been in a stupor all that time--never moving,
never breathing?"

"You will have been in a stupor longer than that, I expect," said I.

"What is this month?" he cried.

"July," I replied.

"July--July!" he muttered. "Impossible! Let me see"--he began to count
on his fingers--"we fell in with the ice and got locked in November. We
had six months of it, I recollect no more. Six months of it, sir; and
suppose the stupor came upon me then, the month at which my memory stops
would be April. Yet you call this July; that is to say, _four months of
oblivion_; impossible!"

"What was the year in which you fell in with the ice?" said I.

"The year?" he exclaimed in a voice deep with the wonder this question
raised in him; "the year? Why, man, what year but _seventeen hundred and
fifty-three_!"

"Good God!" cried I, jumping to my feet with terror at a statement I had
anticipated, though it shocked me as a new and frightful revelation.

"Do you know what year this is?"

He looked at me without answering.

"It is eighteen hundred and one," I cried, and as I said this I recoiled
a step, fully expecting him to leap up and exhibit a hundred
demonstrations of horror and consternation; for this I am persuaded
would have been my posture had any ma