that when blood and honour were up--there! I won't! not at
present!--Scratch it out.

She won't scratch it out, and quite honourable; because we have made an
understanding that everything is to be taken down, and that nothing that
is once taken down shall be scratched out. I have the great misfortune
not to be able to read and write, and I am speaking my true and faithful
account of those Adventures, and my lady is writing it, word for word.

I say, there I was, a-leaning over the bulwarks of the sloop Christopher
Columbus in the South American waters off the Mosquito shore: a subject
of his Gracious Majesty King George of England, and a private in the
Royal Marines.

In those climates, you don't want to do much. I was doing nothing. I
was thinking of the shepherd (my father, I wonder?) on the hillsides by
Snorridge Bottom, with a long staff, and with a rough white coat in all
weathers all the year round, who used to let me lie in a corner of his
hut by night, and who used to let me go about with him and his sheep by
day when I could get nothing else to do, and who used to give me so
little of his victuals and so much of his staff, that I ran away from
him--which was what he wanted all along, I expect--to be knocked about
the world in preference to Snorridge Bottom. I had been knocked about
the world for nine-and-twenty years in all, when I stood looking along
those bright blue South American Waters. Looking after the shepherd, I
may say. Watching him in a half-waking dream, with my eyes half-shut, as
he, and his flock of sheep, and his two dogs, seemed to move away from
the ship's side, far away over the blue water, and go right down into the
sky.

"It's rising out of the water, steady," a voice said close to me. I had
been thinking on so, that it like woke me with a start, though it was no
stranger voice than the voice of Harry Charker, my own comrade.

"What's rising out of the water, steady?" I asked my comrade.

"What?" says he. "The Island."

"O! The Island!" says I, turning my eyes towards it. "True. I forgot
the Island."

"Forgot the port you're going to? That's odd, ain't it?"

"It is odd," says I.

"And odd," he said, slowly considering with himself, "ain't even. Is it,
Gill?"

He had always a remark just like that to make, and seldom another. As
soon as he had brought a thing round to what it was not, he was
satisfied. He was one of the best of men, and, in a certain sort of a
w