1 The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow.
2 Well, then," said he, "this is the berth for me.
3 My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.
4 in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars.
5 For me, at least, there was no secret about the matter, for I was, in a way, a sharer in his alarms.
6 Every day when he came back from his stroll he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the road.
7 "Here you, matey," he cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help up my chest."
8 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.
9 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.
10 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.
11 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.
12 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.
13 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.
14 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.
15 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.
16 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.
17 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.
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