04 金银岛 Treasure Island P7-P8

His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful storiesthey were--about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, andthe Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By hisown account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest menthat God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he toldthese stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as thecrimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would beruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized overand put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe hispresence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on lookingback they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet countrylife, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended toadmire him, calling him a “true sea-dog” and a “real old salt” andsuch like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made Englandterrible at sea.

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

All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in hisdress but to buy some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of hishat having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though itwas a great annoyance when it blew. I remember the appearance of hiscoat, which he patched himself upstairs in his room, and which, beforethe 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 themost part, only when drunk on rum. The great sea-chest none of us hadever seen open.