but I am not sure that I quite
understand."

"I will put it to you more plainly. I ask you whether in
Connecticut you personally knew the Pym family who lived in
Nantucket Island? Arthur Pam's father was one of the principal
merchants there, he was a Navy contractor. It was his son who
embarked in the adventures which he related with his own lips to
Edgar Poe--"

"Captain! Why, that story is due to the powerful imagination of
our great poet. It is a pure invention."

"So, then, you don't believe it, Mr. Jeorling?" said the
captain, shrugging his shoulders three times.

"Neither I nor any other person believes it, Captain Guy, and you
are the first I have heard maintain that it was anything but a mere
romance."

"Listen to me, then, Mr. Jeorling, for although this
'romance'--as you call it--appeared only last year, it is none
the less a reality. Although eleven years have elapsed since the
facts occurred, they are none the less true, and we still await the
' word J of an enigma which will perhaps never be solved."

Yes, he was mad; but by good fortune West was there to take his
place as commander of the schooner. I had only to listen to him, and
as I had read Poe's romance over and over again, I was curious to
hear what the captain had to say about it.

"And now," he resumed in a sharper tone and with a shake in his
voice which denoted a certain amount of nervous irritation, "it is
possible that you did not know the Pym family; that you have never
met them either at Providence or at Nantucket--"

"Or elsewhere."

"Just so! But don't commit yourself by asserting that the Pym
family never existed, that Arthur Gordon is only a fictitious
personage, and his voyage an imaginary one! Do you think any man,
even your Edgar Poe, could have been capable of inventing, of
creating--?"

The increasing vehemence of Captain Len Guy warned me of the
necessity of treating his monomania with respect, and accepting all
he said without discussion.

"Now," he proceeded, "please to keep the facts which I am
about to state clearly in your mind; there is no disputing about
facts. You may deduce any results from them you like. I hope you
will not make me regret that I consented to give you a passage on
the _Halbrane_."

This was an effectual warning, so I made a sign of acquiescence. The
matter promised to be curious. He went on,--

"When Edgar Poe's narrative appeared in 1838, I was at New York.
I immediately started for Ba