Then, raising his hand and impulsively starting upon the mattress, he cried, whilst he tapped his forehead, "It has come back! I have it! Guiseppe Trentanove and I were in the cabin; he had fallen blind with the glare of the ice--if that was it. We confronted each other. On a sudden he screamed out. I had put my face into my arms, and felt myself dying. His cry aroused me. I looked up, and saw him leaning back from the table with his eyes fixed and horror in his countenance. I was too feeble to speak--too languid to rise. I watched him awhile, and then the drowsiness stole over me again, and my head sank, and I remember no more." He shuddered, and extended the pannikin for more liquor. I filled it with two-thirds of brandy and the rest water, and he supped it down as if it had been a thimbleful of wine. "By the holy cross," cried he, "but this is very wonderful, though. How long have you been here, sir?" "Three days." "Three days! and I have been in a stupor all that time--never moving, never breathing?" "You will have been in a stupor longer than that, I expect," said I. "What is this month?" he cried. "July," I replied. "July--July!" he muttered. "Impossible! Let me see"--he began to count on his fingers--"we fell in with the ice and got locked in November. We had six months of it, I recollect no more. Six months of it, sir; and suppose the stupor came upon me then, the month at which my memory stops would be April. Yet you call this July; that is to say, _four months of oblivion_; impossible!" "What was the year in which you fell in with the ice?" said I. "The year?" he exclaimed in a voice deep with the wonder this question raised in him; "the year? Why, man, what year but _seventeen hundred and fifty-three_!" "Good God!" cried I, jumping to my feet with terror at a statement I had anticipated, though it shocked me as a new and frightful revelation. "Do you know what year this is?" He looked at me without answering. "It is eighteen hundred and one," I cried, and as I said this I recoiled a step, fully expecting him to leap up and exhibit a hundred demonstrations of horror and consternation; for this I am persuaded would have been my posture had any man roused me from a slumber and told me I had been in that condition for eight-and-forty years. He continued to view me with a very strange and cunning expression in his eyes, the coolness of which was inexpressibly surprising and bewildering and even mortifying; then presently grasping his beard, looked at it; then put his hands to his face and looked at them; then drew out his feet and looked at _them_; then very slowly, but without visible effort, stood up, swaying a little with an air of weakness, and proceeded to feel and strike himself all over, swinging his arms and using his legs; after which he sat down and pulled the clothes over his naked feet, and fixing his eyes on me afresh, said, "What do you say this year is, sir?" "Eighteen hundred and one," I replied.