基本信息
land, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, i take up my pen in the year of grace 17 - , and go back to the time when my father kept the `admiral benbow' inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof. i remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a handbarrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. * i remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:- `fifteen men on the dead man's chest-
yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!'* in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. this, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste, and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard. `this is a handy cove,' says he, at lengt
