ovyes. He had
passed an adventurous youth, during which he had for eight years
been held to slavery by a negro tribe on the Gambia river; he had
afterwards amassed a considerable fortune, and embarked it in the
ventures of the Company; he had thereupon withdrawn himself to Tresco,
where he had lived for twenty years: so much any man might know
without provocation to his curiosity. The strange feature of Mr.
Lovyes' conduct was revealed to me by the ledgers. For during all
those years he had drawn neither upon his capital nor his interest, so
that his stake in the Company grew larger and larger, with no profit
to himself that any one could discover. It seemed to me, in fact,
clean against nature that a man so rich should so disregard his
wealth; and I busied myself upon the journey with discovering strange
reasons for his seclusion, of which none, I may say, came near the
mark, by so much did the truth exceed them all.

I landed at the harbour of New Grimsey, on Tresco, in the grey
twilight of a September evening; and asking for Mr. Lovyes, was
directed across a little ridge of heather to Dolphin Town, which lies
on the eastward side of Tresco, and looks across Old Grimsey Sound to
the island of St. Helen's. Dolphin Town, you should know, for all its
grand name, boasts but a poor half-score of houses dotted about the
ferns and bracken, with no semblance of order. One of the houses,
however, attracted my notice--first, because it was built in two
storeys, and was, therefore, by a storey taller than the rest; and,
secondly, because all its windows were closely shuttered, and it wore
in that falling light a drooping, melancholy aspect, like a derelict
ship upon the seas. It stood in the middle of this scanty village, and
had a little unkempt garden about it inclosed within a wooden paling.
There was a wicket-gate in the paling, and a rough path from the gate
to the house door, and a few steps to the right of this path a well
was sunk and rigged with a winch and bucket. I was both tired and
thirsty, so I turned into the garden and drew up some water in the
bucket. A narrow track was beaten in the grass between the well and
the house, and I saw with surprise that the stones about the mouth of
the well were splashed and still wet. The house, then, had an inmate.
I looked at it again, but the shutters kept their secret: there was no
glimmer of light visible through any chink. I approached the house,
and from that nearer vantag