There was no snuff-colored cabin, with a scuttle of the diameter of a saucer, to be found on board the _Royal Brunswicker_; this ship therefore could not be the vessel that I was mate of. I was hugely puzzled, and my wits whirred in my brain like the works of a watch when the spring breaks, and I continued to peer over the edge of the hammock that I held pressed down, vainly seeking enlightenment in a plain black locker that stood under the scuttle and in what I must call a washstand in the corner of the berth facing the door, and in a small lamp, resembling a cheap tin coffee-pot, standing upon a metal bracket nailed to the bulkhead. As nothing came to me out of these things I let go the edge of the hammock and gazed at the beam again overhead, and sunk my sensations into the motions of the ship, insomuch that I could feel every roll and toss of her, every dive, pause, and staggering rush forward as though it were a pulse, and I said to myself, “It blows hard, and a tall sea is running, and I am on board a smaller ship than the _Royal Brunswicker_, and our speed cannot be less than twelve knots an hour through the water.” I now grew conscious that I was hungry and thirsty, and as thirst is pain even in its very earliest promptings--unlike hunger, which when first felt is by no means a disagreeable sensation--I endeavored to sit up, intending in that posture to call out, but found myself, as before, helpless. Then I thought I would call out without sitting up, and I opened my mouth, but my lungs would deliver nothing better than a most ridiculous groan. However, after some ten minutes had passed, the top of a man’s head showed over the rim of the hammock. The sight of his eyes and his large cap of fur or hair startled me; I had not heard him enter. “Have you your consciousness?” said he. I answered “Yes.” “I am no doctor,” said he, “and don’t know what I am to do now that your senses have come to you.” “I should like something to drink,” said I. “You shall have it,” he answered, “give the drink a name? Brandy-and-water?” “Anything,” I exclaimed. “I am very thirsty.” “Can you eat?” “I believe I shall be able to eat,” I replied, “when I have drunk.” The head disappeared. Memory now returned. I exactly recollected all that had befallen me down to the moment when, as I have already said, I fancied I beheld the faint color of the dawn lifting like smoke off the black edge of the sea. I gathered by the light in the cabin that it was morning and not yet noon, and conceiving that I might have been taken out of the water some half-hour after I had lost consciousness, I calculated that I had been insensible for nearly five hours. This scared me. A man does not like to feel that he has been as dead to all intents and purposes as a corpse for five hours, not sleeping, but mindless and, for all he knows, soulless.