hey are blinder now. Would they thank
you to arouse them out of their comfortable sleep and force them to feel
as I do, this cold to which they are now as insensible as I was? By
heaven, for my part, I can stand it no longer;" and with that he ran
briskly to the hatch.

I followed him to the cook-room and he crept so close to the furnace
that I thought he had a mind to roast himself. No doubt, newly come to
life as he was, the cold hurt him more than me, and maybe the tide of
those animal spirits which had in his former existence furnished him
with a brute courage had not yet flowed full to his mind; still I
questioned even in his heydey if there had ever been much more than the
swashbuckler in him, which opinion, however, could only increase the
anxiety his companionship was like to cause me by obliging me to
understand that I must prepare myself for treachery, and on no account
whatever to suppose for a moment that he was capable of the least degree
of gratitude or was to be swerved from any design he might form by
considerations of my claim upon him as his preserver.

It is among the wonders of human nature that antagonisms should be found
to flourish under such conditions of hopelessness, misery, and anguish
as make those who languish under them the most pitiful wretches under
God's eye. But so it has been, so it is, so it will ever be. Two men in
an open boat at sea, their lips frothing with thirst, their eyes burning
with famine, shall fall upon each other and fight to the death. Two men
on an island, two miserable castaways whose dismal end can only be a
matter of a week or two, eye each other morosely, give each other
injurious words, break away and sullenly live, each man by himself, on
opposite sides of their desert prison. Beasts do not act thus, nor
birds, nor reptiles--only man. What was in the Frenchman Tassard's mind
I do not know; in mine was fear, dislike, profound distrust, a great
uneasiness, albeit we were alone, we were brothers in affliction and
distress, as completely sundered from the world to which we belonged as
if we lay stranded in the icy moon, speaking in the same tongue and
believing in the same God!

The heat comforted him presently, and he put a lump of wine into the
oven to melt, and this comforted him also.

"I can converse now," said he. "Perhaps after all the danger lies more
in the imagination than in the fact. But it is a hideous naked scene,
and needs no such colouring as the