rly; that in due course it was carried to the
Antarctic main of ice, where it lay compacted; after which, through
stress of weather or by the agency of a particular temperature, a great
mass of it broke away and started on that northward course which bergs
of all magnitude take when they are ruptured from the frozen continent.

This theory may be disputed, but it matters not. My business is to
relate what befell me; if I do my share honestly the candid reader will
not, I believe, quarrel with me for not being able to explain everything
as I go along.

The Frenchman snored, and I sat considering him. The impression he had
made upon me was not agreeable. To be sure he had suffered heavily, and
there was something not displeasing in the spirit he discovered in
telling the story--a spirit I am unable to communicate, as it owed
everything to French vivacity largely spiced with devilment, and to
sudden turns and ejaculations beyond the capacity of my pen to imitate.
But a professional fierceness ran through it too; it was as if he had
licked his chops when he talked of dismissing the captured ship with her
people confined below and her cabin on fire. He had been as good as dead
for nearly fifty years, yet he brought with him into life exactly the
same qualities he had carried with him in his exit. Hence I never now
hear that expression taken from the Latin, "_Of the dead speak nothing
unless good_," without despising it as an unworthy concession to
sentiment; for I have not the least doubt in my mind that, spite of
deathbed repentances and all the horrors which crowd upon the
imagination of a bad man in his last moments--I say I have not the least
doubt that of every hundred persons who die, ninety-nine of them, could
they be raised from the dead, no matter how many years or even centuries
they might have lain in their graves, would exhibit their original
natures, and pursue exactly the same courses which made them loved or
scorned or feared or neglected before, which brought them to the gallows
or which qualified them to die in peace with faces brightening to the
opening heavens. If Nero did not again fire Rome he would be equal to
crimes as great, and desire nothing better than the opportunity for
them. Caesar would again be the tyrant, and the sword of Brutus would
once more fulfil its mission. Richard III. would emerge in his
winding-sheet with the same humpbacked character in which he had
expired, the Queen of Scots ret