Ruby, turning, met a pair of luminous eyes gazing on her with bold
admiration. The eyes were set in a cadaverous, but handsome, face; and
the face belonged to the stranger, who had recovered of his swoon, and
was now stretched on the settle beside the fire.

"I don't know who you may be, sir, but--"

"You are kind enough to excuse my rising to introduce myself.
My name is Zebedee Minards."

CHAPTER IV.

YOUNG ZEB FETCHES A CHEST OF DRAWERS.

The parish of Ruan Lanihale is bounded on the west by Porthlooe, a
fishing town of fifteen hundred inhabitants or less, that blocks the
seaward exit of a narrow coombe. A little stream tumbles down this
coombe towards the "Hauen," divides the folk into parishioners of
Lanihale and Landaviddy, and receives impartially the fish offal of
both. There is a good deal of this offal, especially during pilchard
time, and the towns-folk live on their first storeys, using the lower
floors as fish cellars, or "pallaces." But even while the nose most
abhors, the eye is delighted by jumbled houses, crazy stairways leading
to green doors, a group of children dabbling in the mud at low tide, a
congregation of white gulls, a line of fishing boats below the quay
where the men lounge and whistle and the barked nets hang to dry, and,
beyond all, the shorn outline of two cliffs with a wedge of sea and sky
between.

Mr. Zebedee Minards the elder dwelt on the eastern or Lanihale side of
the stream, and a good way back from the Hauen, beside the road that
winds inland up the coombe. Twenty yards of garden divided his cottage
door from the road, and prevented the inmates from breaking their necks
as they stepped over its threshold. Even as it was, Old Zeb had
acquired a habit of singing out "Ware heads!" to the wayfarers whenever
he chanced to drop a rotund object on his estate; and if any small
article were missing indoors, would descend at once to the highway with
the cheerful assurance, based on repeated success, of finding it
somewhere below.

Over and above its recurrent crop of potatoes and flatpoll cabbages,
this precipitous garden depended for permanent interest on a collection
of marine curiosities, all eloquent of disaster to shipping. To begin
with, a colossal and highly varnished Cherokee, once the figure-head of
a West Indiaman, stood sentry by the gate and hung forward over the
road, to the discomfiture of unwarned and absent-minded bagmen. The
path to the door was guard