ork. Though the sail was eight-and-forty years old
and perhaps older, it offered as tough and stout a surface to the wind
as if it was fresh from the sailmaker's hands, so great are the
preserving qualities of ice. I looked wistfully at the topsail, but on
reflecting that if it should come on to blow hard enough to compel me to
heave the brig to she would never hull with that canvas abroad, I
resolved to let it lie, for I could cut away the spritsail if the
necessity arose and not greatly regret its loss; but to lose the topsail
would be a serious matter, though if I did not cut it adrift it might
carry away the mast for me; so, as I say, I would not meddle with it.

Finding that the ship continued to steer herself very well, and the
better for the spritsail, I thought I would get the body of the old
Frenchman overboard and so obtain a clear hold for myself so far as
corpses went. I carried the lanthorn into the forecastle, but when I
pulled the hammock off him I confess it was not without a stupid fear
that I should find him alive. Recollection of his astounding vitality
found something imperishable in that ugly anatomy, and though he lay
before me as dead and cold as stone, I yet had a fancy that the seeds of
life were still in him, that 'twas only the current of his being that
had frozen, that if I were to thaw him afresh he might recover, and
that if I buried him I should actually be despatching him.

But though these fancies possessed, they did not control me. I took his
watch and whatever else he had in that way, carried him on deck and
dropped him over the side, using as little ceremony as he had employed
in the disposal of his shipmates, but affected by very different
emotions; for there was not only the idea that the vital spark was still
in him; I could not but handle with awe the most mysterious corpse the
eye had ever viewed, one who had lived through a stupor or death-sleep,
for eight-and-forty years, in whom in a few hours Time had compressed
the wizardry he stretches in others over half a century; who in a night
had shrunk from the aspect of his prime into the lean, puckered,
bleared-eyed, deaf, and tottering expression of a hundred years.

But now he was gone! The bubbles which rose to the plunge of his body
were his epitaph; had they risen blood-red they would have better
symbolized his life. The albatross stooped to the spot where he had
vanished with a hoarse salt scream like the laugh of a delirious