blew. I remember the appearance of his coat,
which he patched himself up-stairs in his room, and which, before the
end, was nothing but patches. He never wrote or received a letter, and he
never spoke with any but the neighbours, and with these, for the most
part, only when drunk on rum. The great sea-chest none of us had ever
seen open.

He was only once crossed, and that was towards the end, when my poor
father was far gone in a decline that took him off. Dr. Livesey came late
one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my mother,
and went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should come
down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old "Benbow." I
followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright
doctor, with his powder as white as snow, and his bright black eyes and
pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all, with
that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting far
gone in rum, with his arms on the table. Suddenly he--the captain, that
is--began to pipe up his eternal song:--

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

At first I had supposed "the dead man's chest" to be that identical big
box of his up-stairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled
in my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man. But by this
time we had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it
was new, that night, to nobody but Dr. Livesey, and on him I observed it
did not produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment quite
angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener, on a
new cure for the rheumatics. In the meantime, the captain gradually
brightened up at his own music, and at last flapped his hand upon the
table before him in a way we all knew to mean--silence. The voices
stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey's; he went on as before, speaking
clear and kind, and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or
two. The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again,
glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath:
"Silence, there, between decks!"

"Were you addressing me, sir?" says the doctor; and when the ruffian had
told him, with another oath, that this was so, "I have only one thing to
say to you, sir," replie