"Bah!" said he, and shook his head very knowingly. "No matter; you have been shipwrecked too! Sir, shipwreck shuffles dates as a player does cards, and the best of us will go wrong in famine, loneliness, cold, and peril. Be of good cheer, my friend; all will return to you. Sit, sir, that I may hear your adventures, and I will relate mine." I saw how it was--he supposed me deranged, a mortifying construction to place upon the language of a man who had restored him to life; yet a few moments' reflection taught me to see the reasonableness of it, for unless he thought me crazy he must conclude I spoke the truth, and it was inconceivable he should believe that he had lain in a frozen condition for eight-and-forty years. I stirred the fire to make more light and sat down near the furnace. His appearance was very striking. The scar upon his forehead gave a very dark sullen look to his brows; his eyes were small and were half lost in the dusky hollows in which they were set, and I observed an indescribably leering, cunning expression in them, something of which I attributed to the large quantity of liquor he had swallowed. This contrasted oddly with the respectable aspect he took from his baldness--that is, from the nakedness of his poll, for, as I have before said, his hair fell long and plentifully, in a ring a little above the ears, so that you would have supposed at some late period of his life he had been scalped. I know not how it was, but I felt no joy in this man's company. For some companion, for some one to speak with, I had yearned again and again with heart-breaking passion; and now a living man sat before me, yet I was sensible of no gladness. In truth, I was overawed by him; he frightened me as one risen from the dead. Here was a creature that had entered, as it seemed to me, those black portals from which no man ever returns, and had come back, through my instrumentality, after hard upon fifty years of the grave. Reason as I might that it was all perfectly in nature, that there was nothing necromantic or diabolic in it, that it could not have happened had it not been natural, my spirits were as much oppressed and confounded by his sitting there alive, talking, and watching me, as if, being truly dead, life had entered him on a sudden, and he had risen and walked. I have no doubt the disorder my mind was in helped to persuade him that I had not the full possession of my senses. He ran his eye over my figure and then round the cook-room, and said, "I am impatient to learn your story, sir."