embling company to listen to his
stories or bear a chorus to his singing. Often I have heard the house
shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum"; all the neighbours joining
in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing
louder than the other, to avoid remark. For in these fits he was the most
overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table, for
silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question,
or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not
following his story. Nor would he allow any one to leave the inn till he
had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories
they were; about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and
the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his
own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men
that God ever allowed upon the sea; and the language in which he told
these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the
crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be
ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannised over
and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his
presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking
back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country
life; and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to
admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog," and a "real old salt," and
suchlike names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England
terrible at sea.

In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us; for he kept on staying week
after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had been
long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to insist
on having more. If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through his
nose so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor father
out of the room. I have seen him wringing his hands after such a rebuff,
and I am sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have greatly
hastened his early and unhappy death.

All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in his
dress but to buy some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of his
hat having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it was
a great annoyance when it