were even pleasing. His skin, wherever it was exposed, was
burnt by the sun; even his lips were black, and his fair eyes looked
quite startling in so dark a face. Of all the beggar-men that I had seen
or fancied, he was the chief for raggedness. He was clothed with tatters
of old ship's 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 accoutrement.

"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 can 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 grave-stones! That's what it
begun with, but it went further'n