d with tatters
of old ships' canvas and old sea-cloth, and this extraordinary patchwork
was all held together by a system of the most various and incongruous
fastenings, brass buttons, bits of stick, and loops of tarry gaskin.
About his waist he wore an old brass-buckled leather belt, which was the
one thing solid in his whole accouterment.

"Three years!" I cried. "Were you shipwrecked?"

"Nay, mate," said he, "marooned."

I had heard the word and I knew it stood for a horrible kind of
punishment common enough among the buccaneers, in which the offender is
put ashore with a little powder and shot and left behind on some
desolate and distant island.

"Marooned three years agone," he continued, "and lived on goats since
then, and berries and oysters. Wherever a man is, says I, a man can do
for himself. But, mate, my heart is sore for Christian diet. You
mightn't happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well,
many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese--toasted, mostly--and woke
up again, and here I were."

"If ever I can get aboard again," said I, "you shall have cheese by the
stone."

All this time he had been feeling the stuff of my jacket, smoothing my
hands, looking at my boots, and generally, in the intervals of his
speech, showing a childish pleasure in the presence of a
fellow-creature. But at my last words he perked up into a kind of
startled slyness.

"If ever you get aboard again, says you?" he repeated. "Why, now, who's
to hinder you?"

"Not you, I know," was my reply.

"And right you was," he cried. "Now you--what do you call yourself,
mate?"

"Jim," I told him.

"Jim, Jim," says he, quite pleased, apparently. "Well, now, Jim, I've
lived that rough as you'd be ashamed to hear of. Now, for instance, you
wouldn't think I had had a pious mother--to look at me?" he asked.

"Why, no, not in particular," I answered.

"Ah, well," said he, "but I had--remarkable pious. And I was a civil,
pious boy, and could rattle off my catechism that fast as you couldn't
tell one word from another. And here's what it come to, Jim, and it
begun with chuck-farthen on the blessed gravestones! That's what it
begun with, but it went further'n that, and so my mother told me, and
predicked the whole, she did, the pious woman. But it were Providence
that put me here. I've thought it all out in this here lonely island and
I'm back on piety. You can't catch me tasting rum so much, but just a
thimbleful for lu