My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity. 'This is a handy cove,' says he at length 'and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. 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.

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. In the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. 'Fifteen men on the dead man's chest-Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!' I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards: 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 shoulders 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. 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.

Treasure island book pages