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The day had been so full of business, there had been so much to engage my mind, that it was not until I was seated at supper in the old cook-room in which I had passed so many melancholy hours, that I found myself able to take a calm survey of my situation, and to compare the various motions of my fortunes. I could scarcely indeed believe that I was not in a dream from which I should awake presently, and discover myself still securely imprisoned in the ice, and all those passages of the powder-blasts, the liberation of the schooner, my lonely days in her afloat, my encounter with the whaler, as visionary and vanishing as those dusky forms of vapour which had swarmed in giant-shape over my little open boat.
But even if confirmation had been wanting in the sable visage of Billy Pitt, who sat near the furnace munching away with prodigious enjoyment of his food and bringing his can of hot spiced wine from his vast blubber lips with a mighty sigh of deep delight, I must have found it in each hissing leap and roaring plunge of the old piratical bucket, so full of the vitality of the wind-swollen canvas, so quick with all the life-instincts of a vessel storming through the deep with buoyant keel and under full control. Oh, heaven! how different from the dull ambling of the morning, the sluggish pitching and rolling to the weak pulling of the spritsail!