he point caused a rush on
the part of the boys down to the pier and drew the attention of the
fishermen up on the cliff as well. But these latter did not stir, only
growled out something about the cap'n's boat from the Den. One man only
made the comment that the sail wanted "tannin' agen," and that was all.

But the boys were interested and busy as they swarmed to the edge of the
unprotected pier, along which they sat and stood as closely as the
upright puffins in their white waistcoats standing in rows along the
ledges that towered up above the point. For everybody knew everybody
there for miles round, and every boat as well.

There was a good deal of grinning and chattering going on as the boat
neared, especially from one old fisherman who lived inside a huge pair
of very stiff trousers, these coming right up to his arm-pits, so that
only a very short pair of braces, a scrap of blue shirt, and a woollen
night-cap were required to complete his costume.

This gentleman smiled, grunted, placed a fresh bit of black tobacco in
his cheek, and took notice of the fact that several of the boys had made
a rush to the edge of the water by the harbour and come back loaded with
decaying fish--scraps of skate, trimmings, especially the tails, heads,
and offal--to take their places again, standing behind their sitting
companions.

Someone else saw the action too, and began to descend from the cliff by
the long slope whose water end was close to the shore end of the pier.

This personage would have been a tall, broad-shouldered man had he been
all there; but he was not, for he had left his legs in the West Indies,
off the coast of Martinique, when a big round shot from a French battery
came skipping over the water and cut them off, as the ship's surgeon
said, almost as cleanly as he could have done with the knife and saw he
used on the poor fellow after the action was over, the fort taken, and
the Frenchmen put to flight.

The result was that Thomas Bodger came back after some months to his
native village, quite cured, in the best of health, and wearing a pair
of the shortest wooden legs ever worn by crippled man--his pegs, as the
boys of Rockabie called them, though he dignified them himself by the
name of toes. As to his looks, he was a fine-looking man to just below
his hips, and there he had been razed, as he called it to Aleck Donne,
while the most peculiar thing about him as he toddled along was what at
first sight lo