He looked it. Ha, thought I, I was dreading your treachery yesterday; there is nothing more to fear. Besides that he was nearly stone deaf, he could hardly see; and I was sure, if he should be able to move at all, he could not stir a leg without the help of sticks. I was going to roar out to him that we were adrift, but he looked so imbecile that I thought, to what purpose? If there be aught of memory in him, let him sit and chew the cud thereof. He cannot last long; the cold must soon stop his heart. And with that I went on eating my breakfast in silence, but greatly affected by this astonishing mark of the hand of Providence, and under a very heavy and constant sense of awe, for the like of such a transformation I am sure had never before encountered mortal eyes, and it was terrifying to be alone with it. CHAPTER XXIV. THE FRENCHMAN DIES. However, if I expected my Frenchman to sit very long silent, he soon undeceived me by beginning to complain in his tremulous aged voice of his weakness and aching limbs. "'Tis the terrible cold that has affected me," said he, whilst his head nodded nervously. "I feel the rheumatism in every bone. There is no weakness like the rheumatic, I have heard, and 'tis true, 'tis true. It may lay me along--yes, by the Virgin, 'tis rheumatism--what else?" Here he was interrupted by a long fit of coughing, and when it was ended he turned to address me again, but looked at the bulkhead on my right, as if his vision could not fix me. "But my capers are not over!" he cried, setting up his rickety shrill throat; "no, no! Vive l'amour! vive la joie! The sun is coming--the sun is the fountain of life--ay, mon brave, there are some shakes in these stout legs yet!" He shook his head with a fine air of cunning and knowingness, grinning very oddly; and then, falling grave with a startling suddenness, he began to dribble out a piratical love-story he had once before favoured me with, describing the charms of the woman with a horrid leer, his head nodding with the nervous affection of age all the time, whilst he looked blindly in my direction--a hideous and yet pitiful object! I could not say that his mind was gone, but he talked with many breaks for breath, and not very coherently, as though the office of his tongue was performed by habit rather than memory, so that he often went far astray and babbled into sentences that had no reference to what had gone before, though on the whole I managed to collect what he meant. I was sure he had not power enough of vision to observe me in the dim reddish light of the cook-room, and this being so, he could not know I was present, more particularly as he could not hear me, yet he persisted in his poor babble, which was a behaviour in him that, more than even the matter of his speech, persuaded me of his imbecility.