I concluded therefore that the monotony of our voyage would continue unbroken to the end.

But, on the morning of the 20th of August, to my extreme surprise, Captain Len Guy came on deck, approached me, and said, speaking very low,-- "Sir, I have something to say to you." "I am ready to hear you, captain." "I have not spoken until to-day, for I am naturally taciturn." Here he hesitated again, but after a pause, continued with an effort,-- "Mr.Jeorling, have you tried to discover my reason for changing my mind on the subject of your passage ?" "I have tried, but I have not succeeded, captain.

Perhaps, as I am not a compatriot of yours, you--" "It is precisely because you are an American that I decided in the end to offer you a passage on the _Halbrane_." "Because I am an American ?" "Also, because you come from Connecticut." "I don't understand." "You will understand if I add that I thought it possible, since you belong to Connecticut, since you have visited Nantucket Island, that you might have known the family of Arthur Gordon Pym." "The hero of Edgar Poe's romance ?" "The same.

His narrative was founded upon the manuscript in which the details of that extraordinary and disastrous voyage across the Antarctic Sea was related." I thought I must be dreaming when I heard Captain Len Guy's words.
Edgar Poe's romance was nothing but a fiction, a work of imagination by the most brilliant of our American writers.

And here was a sane man treating that fiction as a reality.
I could not answer him.