k as
he was, we were all in fear of death for him, and the doctor was
suddenly taken up with a case many miles away, and was never near the
house after my father's death. I have said the captain was weak, and
indeed he seemed rather to grow weaker than to regain his strength. He
clambered up and down stairs, and went from the parlor to the bar and
back again, and sometimes put his nose out of doors to smell the sea,
holding on to the walls as he went for support, and breathing hard and
fast, like a man on a steep mountain. He never particularly addressed
me, and it is my belief he had as good as forgotten his confidences; but
his temper was more flighty, and, allowing for his bodily weakness, more
violent than ever. He had an alarming way now when he was drunk of
drawing his cutlass and laying it bare before him on the table. But,
with all that, he minded people less, and seemed shut up in his own
thoughts and rather wandering. Once, for instance, to our extreme
wonder, he piped up to a different air, a kind of country love-song,
that he must have learned in his youth before he had begun to follow the
sea.

So things passed until the day after the funeral and about three o'clock
of a bitter, foggy, frosty afternoon, I was standing at the door for a
moment, full of sad thoughts about my father, when I saw someone drawing
slowly near along the road. He was plainly blind, for he tapped before
him with a stick, and wore a great green shade over his eyes and nose;
and he was hunched, as if with age or weakness, and wore a huge old
tattered sea-cloak with a hood that made him appear positively deformed.
I never saw in my life a more dreadful-looking figure. He stopped a
little from the inn and, raising his voice in an odd sing-song,
addressed the air in front of him:

"Will any kind friend inform a poor blind man, who has lost the precious
sight of his eyes in the gracious defense of his native country,
England, and God bless King George!--where or in what part of this
country he may now be?"

"You are at the 'Admiral Benbow,' Black Hill Cove, my good man," said I.

"I hear a voice," said he, "a young voice. Will you give me your hand,
my kind young friend, and lead me in?"

I held out my hand, and the horrible, soft-spoken, eyeless creature
gripped it in a moment like a vise. I was so much startled that I
struggled to withdraw, but the blind man pulled me close up to him with
a single action of his arm.

"Now, boy,"