ieved that frost served cloth
so. At last I managed to pull the coat clear of the hilt of the hanger;
the blade was stuck, but after I had tugged a bit it slipped out, and I
found it a good piece of steel.

The corpse was habited in jackboots, a coat of coarse thick cloth lined
with flannel, under this a kind of blouse or doublet of red cloth,
confined by a belt with leathern loops for pistols. His apparel gave me
no clue to the age he belonged to; it was no better, indeed, than a sort
of masquerading attire, as though the fashions of more than one country,
and perhaps of more than one age, had gone to the habiting of him. He
looked a burly, immense creature, as he lay upon the deck in the same
bent attitude in which he had stood at the rail, and so dreadful was his
face, with a singular diabolical expression of leering malice, caused by
the lids of his eyes being half closed, that having taken one peep I had
no mind to repeat it, though I was above ten minutes wrestling with his
cloak and hanger before I had the weapon fairly in my hand.

I walked to the companion and fell to scraping the snow away from it.
'Twas like scratching at mortar between bricks. But I worked hard, and
presently, with the point of the hanger, felt the crevice 'twixt the
door and its jamb, after which it was not long before I had carved the
door out of its plate of ice and snow.

The wind was now blowing a fresh gale, and the howling aloft was
extremely melancholy and dismal. I could not see the ocean, but I heard
it thundering with a hollow roaring note; and the sharp reports and
distant sullen crashing noises, with nearer convulsions within the ice,
were very frequent.

My labour warmed me, but it also increased my hunger. While I hacked and
scraped at the snow I was considering whether I should come across
anything fit to eat in the ship, and if not what I was to do. Here was
a vessel assuredly not less than fifty or sixty years old, and even
supposing she was almost new when she fell in with the ice, the date of
her disaster would still carry her back half a century; so that--and
certainly there was much in the appearance of the body on the rocks to
warrant the conjecture--she would have been thus sepulchred and
fossilized for fifty years!

What, then, in the form of provisions proper for human food, such as
even a famine-driven stomach could deal with, was I likely to find in
her? Would not her crew have eaten her bare, devoured the ve