Treasure Island [antikvár]

PART I THE OLD BUCCANEER chapter I THE OLD SEA-DOG AT THE "ADMIRAL BENBOW" Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of the 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. 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. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that olid sea-song that he sang,so often afterwards:— "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest— "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of ram!" in the high, old, tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars.^ Then he rapped