"Three days! and I have been in a stupor all that time—never moving, never breathing?"
"You will have been in a stupor longer than that, I expect," said I.
"What is this month?" he cried.
"July," I replied.
"July—July!" he muttered. "Impossible! Let me see"—he began to count on his fingers—"we fell in with the ice and got locked in November. We had six months of it, I recollect no more. Six months of it, sir; and suppose the stupor came upon me then, the month at which my memory stops would be April. Yet you call this July; that is to say, four months of oblivion; impossible!"
"What was the year in which you fell in with the ice?" said I.
"The year?" he exclaimed in a voice deep with the wonder this question raised in him; "the year? Why, man, what year but seventeen hundred and fifty-three!"
"Good God!" cried I, jumping to my feet with terror at a statement I had anticipated, though it shocked me as a new and frightful revelation.
"Do you know what year this is?"
He looked at me without answering.