across the Polar Sea to Tsalal Island--"

"Captain," said I, just as though I entertained no doubt of the
authenticity of Edgar Poe's romance, "is it not the case that
all these men perished, some in the attack on the schooner, the
others by the infernal device of the natives of Tsalal?"

"Who can tell?" replied the captain in a voice hoarse from
emotion. "Who can say but that some of the unfortunate creatures
survived, and contrived to escape from the natives?"

"In any case," I replied, "it would be difficult to admit that
those who had survived could still be living."

"And why?"

"Because the facts we are discussing are eleven years old."

"Sir," replied the captain, "since Arthur Pym and Dirk Peters
were able to advance beyond Tsalal Island farther than the
eighty-third parallel, since they found means of living in the midst
of those Antarctic lands, why should not their companions, if they
were not all killed by the natives, if they were so fortunate as to
reach the neighbouring islands sighted during the voyage--why
should not those unfortunate countrymen of mine have contrived to
live there? Why should they not still be there, awaiting their
deliverance?"

"Your pity leads you astray, captain," I replied. "It would
be impossible."

"Impossible, sir! And if a fact, on indisputable evidence,
appealed to the whole civilized world; if a material proof of the
existence of these unhappy men, imprisoned at the ends of the earth,
were furnished, who would venture to meet those who would fain go to
their aid with the cry of 'Impossible!'"

Was it a sentiment of humanity, exaggerated to the point of madness,
that had roused the interest of this strange man in those
shipwrecked folk who never had suffered shipwreck, for the good
reason that they never had existed?

Captain Len Guy approached me anew, laid his hand on my shoulder and
whispered in my ear,--

"No, sir, no! the last word has not been said concerning the crew
of the __Jane__."

Then he promptly withdrew.

The _Jane_ was, in Edgar Poe's romance, the name of the ship which
had rescued Arthur Pym and Dirk Peters from the wreck of the
__Grampus__, and Captain Len Guy had now uttered it for the first time.
It occurred to me then that Guy was the name of the captain of the
_Jane_, an English ship; but what of that? The captain of the _Jane_
never lived but in the imagination of the novelist, he and the
skipper of the _Halbrane_ have nothing in comm