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            <h1>Treasure Island</h1>

            <p><a name="id380362"><!--anchor--></a>SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
            asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
            the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
            island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
            take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when
            my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the
            sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.</p>
            <p><a name="id380370"><!--anchor--></a>I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the
            inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow—a
            tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the
            shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with
            black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
            white. I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself
            as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
            often afterwards:</p>
            <p><a name="id380380"><!--anchor--></a>in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
            broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of
            stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared,
            called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him,
            he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still
            looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.</p>
            <p><a name="id380387"><!--anchor--></a>"This is a handy cove," says he at length; "and a pleasant sittyated
            grog-shop. Much company, mate?"</p>
            <p><a name="id380391"><!--anchor--></a>My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.</p>
            <p><a name="id380395"><!--anchor--></a>"Well, then," said he, "this is the berth for me. Here you, matey," he
            cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help
            up my chest. I'll stay here a bit," he continued. "I'm a plain man; rum
            and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch
            ships off. What you mought call me? You mought call me captain. Oh, I
            see what you're at—there"; and he threw down three or four gold pieces
            on the threshold. "You can tell me when I've worked through that," says
            he, looking as fierce as a commander.</p>
            <p><a name="id380407"><!--anchor--></a>And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none
            of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like
            a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike. The man who came
            with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at
            the Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the
            coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as
            lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence. And
            that was all we could learn of our guest.</p>
            <p><a name="id380415"><!--anchor--></a>He was a very silent man by custom. All day he hung round the cove or
            upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner
            of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong. Mostly
            he would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and
            blow through his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came
            about our house soon learned to let him be. Every day when he came back
            from his stroll he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the
            road. At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind
            that made him ask this question, but at last we began to see he was
            desirous to avoid them. When a seaman did put up at the Admiral Benbow
            (as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol) he
            would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the
            parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such
            was present. For me, at least, there was no secret about the matter, for
            I was, in a way, a sharer in his alarms. He had taken me aside one day
            and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I
            would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg"
            and let him know the moment he appeared. Often enough when the first
            of the month came round and I applied to him for my wage, he would only
            blow through his nose at me and stare me down, but before the week was
            out he was sure to think better of it, bring me my four-penny piece, and
            repeat his orders to look out for "the seafaring man with one leg."</p>
            <p><a name="id380431"><!--anchor--></a>How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On
            stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and
            the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a
            thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg
            would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous
            kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the
            middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and
            ditch was the worst of nightmares. And altogether I paid pretty dear for
            my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.</p>
            <p><a name="id380445"><!--anchor--></a>But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one
            leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who
            knew him. There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water
            than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his
            wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call
            for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his
            stories or bear a chorus to his singing. Often I have heard the house
            shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum," all the neighbours joining
            in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing
            louder than the other to avoid remark. For in these fits he was the most
            overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for
            silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question,
            or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not
            following his story. Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he
            had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.</p>
            <p><a name="id380457"><!--anchor--></a>His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories
            they were—about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and
            the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his
            own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men
            that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told
            these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the
            crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be
            ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over
            and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his
            presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking
            back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country
            life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to
            admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt" and
            such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England
            terrible at sea.</p>
            <p><a name="id380478"><!--anchor--></a>In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us, for he kept on staying week
            after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had
            been long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to
            insist on having more. If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through
            his nose so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor
            father out of the room. I have seen him wringing his hands after such a
            rebuff, and I am sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have
            greatly hastened his early and unhappy death.</p>
            <p><a name="id380486"><!--anchor--></a>All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in his
            dress but to buy some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of his
            hat having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it
            was a great annoyance when it blew. I remember the appearance of his
            coat, which he patched himself upstairs in his room, and which, before
            the end, was nothing but patches. He never wrote or received a letter,
            and he never spoke with any but the neighbours, and with these, for the
            most part, only when drunk on rum. The great sea-chest none of us had
            ever seen open.</p>
            <p><a name="id380494"><!--anchor--></a>He was only once crossed, and that was towards the end, when my poor
            father was far gone in a decline that took him off. Dr. Livesey came
            late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my
            mother, and went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should
            come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old Benbow. I
            followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright
            doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and
            pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all,
            with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting,
            far gone in rum, with his arms on the table. Suddenly he—the captain,
            that is—began to pipe up his eternal song:</p>
            <p><a name="id380509"><!--anchor--></a>At first I had supposed "the dead man's chest" to be that identical big
            box of his upstairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled
            in my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man. But by this
            time we had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it
            was new, that night, to nobody but Dr. Livesey, and on him I observed it
            did not produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment quite
            angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener, on
            a new cure for the rheumatics. In the meantime, the captain gradually
            brightened up at his own music, and at last flapped his hand upon
            the table before him in a way we all knew to mean silence. The voices
            stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey's; he went on as before speaking
            clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or
            two. The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again,
            glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath,
            "Silence, there, between decks!"</p>
            <p><a name="id380521"><!--anchor--></a>"Were you addressing me, sir?" says the doctor; and when the ruffian had
            told him, with another oath, that this was so, "I have only one thing to
            say to you, sir," replies the doctor, "that if you keep on drinking rum,
            the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!"</p>
            <p><a name="id380527"><!--anchor--></a>The old fellow's fury was awful. He sprang to his feet, drew and opened
            a sailor's clasp-knife, and balancing it open on the palm of his hand,
            threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.</p>
            <p><a name="id380532"><!--anchor--></a>The doctor never so much as moved. He spoke to him as before, over his
            shoulder and in the same tone of voice, rather high, so that all the
            room might hear, but perfectly calm and steady: "If you do not put that
            knife this instant in your pocket, I promise, upon my honour, you shall
            hang at the next assizes."</p>
            <p><a name="id380538"><!--anchor--></a>Then followed a battle of looks between them, but the captain soon
            knuckled under, put up his weapon, and resumed his seat, grumbling like
            a beaten dog.</p>
            <p><a name="id380542"><!--anchor--></a>"And now, sir," continued the doctor, "since I now know there's such a
            fellow in my district, you may count I'll have an eye upon you day and
            night. I'm not a doctor only; I'm a magistrate; and if I catch a breath
            of complaint against you, if it's only for a piece of incivility like
            tonight's, I'll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed
            out of this. Let that suffice."</p>
            <p><a name="id380549"><!--anchor--></a>Soon after, Dr. Livesey's horse came to the door and he rode away, but
            the captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come.</p>

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