His voice sank; he looked at me in silence, and then with a wild grin of anger he exclaimed, "What made you awake me? I was at peace--neither cold, hungry, nor hopeless! What demon forced you to bring me to this--to bring me back to _this_?" "Mr. Tassard," said I coldly, "I don't ask your pardon for my experiment; I meant well, and to my mind it is no failure yet. But for disturbing your repose I do sincerely beg your forgiveness, and solemnly promise you, if you will return to the state in which I found you, that I will not repeat the offence." He eyed me from top to toe in silence, filled and lighted his hideous pipe, and smoked with his back turned upon me. Had there been another warm place in the schooner I should have retired to it, and left this surly and scandalous savage to the enjoyment of his own company. His temper rendered me extremely uneasy. The arms-room was full of weapons; he might draw a pistol upon me and shoot me dead before I should have time to clench my hand. Nor did I conceive him to have his right mind. His panic terrors and outbursts of rage were such extremes of behaviour as suggested some sort of organic decay within. He had been for eight-and-forty years insensible; in all that time the current of life had been frozen in him, not dried up and extinguished; therefore, taking his age to be fifty-five when the frost seized him, he would now be one hundred and three years old, having subsisted into this great span of time in fact, though confronting me with the aspect of an elderly man merely. Death ends time, but this man never had been dead, or surely it would not have been in the power of brandy and chafing and fire to arouse him; and though all the processes of nature had been checked in him for near half a century, yet he must have been throughout as much alive as a sleeping man, and consequently when he awoke he arose with the weight of a hundred and three years upon his brain, which may suffice to account for the preternatural peculiarities of his character.