n roused me from a slumber and told
me I had been in that condition for eight-and-forty years.

He continued to view me with a very strange and cunning expression in
his eyes, the coolness of which was inexpressibly surprising and
bewildering and even mortifying; then presently grasping his beard,
looked at it; then put his hands to his face and looked at them; then
drew out his feet and looked at _them_; then very slowly, but without
visible effort, stood up, swaying a little with an air of weakness, and
proceeded to feel and strike himself all over, swinging his arms and
using his legs; after which he sat down and pulled the clothes over his
naked feet, and fixing his eyes on me afresh, said, "What do you say
this year is, sir?"

"Eighteen hundred and one," I replied.

"Bah!" said he, and shook his head very knowingly. "No matter; you have
been shipwrecked too! Sir, shipwreck shuffles dates as a player does
cards, and the best of us will go wrong in famine, loneliness, cold, and
peril. Be of good cheer, my friend; all will return to you. Sit, sir,
that I may hear your adventures, and I will relate mine."

I saw how it was--he supposed me deranged, a mortifying construction to
place upon the language of a man who had restored him to life; yet a few
moments' reflection taught me to see the reasonableness of it, for
unless he thought me crazy he must conclude I spoke the truth, and it
was inconceivable he should believe that he had lain in a frozen
condition for eight-and-forty years.

I stirred the fire to make more light and sat down near the furnace. His
appearance was very striking. The scar upon his forehead gave a very
dark sullen look to his brows; his eyes were small and were half lost in
the dusky hollows in which they were set, and I observed an
indescribably leering, cunning expression in them, something of which I
attributed to the large quantity of liquor he had swallowed. This
contrasted oddly with the respectable aspect he took from his
baldness--that is, from the nakedness of his poll, for, as I have before
said, his hair fell long and plentifully, in a ring a little above the
ears, so that you would have supposed at some late period of his life he
had been scalped.

I know not how it was, but I felt no joy in this man's company. For some
companion, for some one to speak with, I had yearned again and again
with heart-breaking passion; and now a living man sat before me, yet I
was sensible of no gla