dness. In truth, I was overawed by him; he
frightened me as one risen from the dead. Here was a creature that had
entered, as it seemed to me, those black portals from which no man ever
returns, and had come back, through my instrumentality, after hard upon
fifty years of the grave. Reason as I might that it was all perfectly in
nature, that there was nothing necromantic or diabolic in it, that it
could not have happened had it not been natural, my spirits were as much
oppressed and confounded by his sitting there alive, talking, and
watching me, as if, being truly dead, life had entered him on a sudden,
and he had risen and walked.

I have no doubt the disorder my mind was in helped to persuade him that
I had not the full possession of my senses. He ran his eye over my
figure and then round the cook-room, and said, "I am impatient to learn
your story, sir."

"Why, sir," said I, "my story is summed up in what I have already told
you." But that he might not be at a loss--for to be sure he had only
very newly collected his intellects--I related my adventures at large.
He drew nearer to the furnace whilst I talked, bringing his covering of
clothes along with him, and held out his great hands to toast at the
fire, all the time observing me with scarce a wink of the eye. Arrived
at the end of my tale, I told him how only last night I had dragged his
companion on deck, and how he was to have followed but for his posture.

"Ha!" cried he, "you might have caused my flesh to mortify by laying me
close to the fire. It would have been better to rub me with snow."

He poked up one foot after the other to count his toes, fearing some had
come away with his stockings, and then said, "Well, and how long should
I have slept had you not come? Another week! By St. Paul, I might have
died. Have you my stockings, sir?"

I gave them to him, and he pulled them over his legs and then drew on
his boots and stood up, the coats and wraps tumbling off him as he rose.

"I can stand," says he. "That is good."

But in attempting to take a step he reeled and would have fallen had I
not grasped his arm.

"Patience, my friend, patience!" he muttered as if to himself. "I must
lie a little longer," and with that he kneeled and then lay along the
mattress. He breathed heavily and pointed to the pannikin. I asked him
whether he would have wine or brandy; he answered, "Wine," so I melted a
draught, which dose, I thought, on top of what he had alread