 'Treasure Island' - Robert Louis Stevenson
 
 
 The Old Sea-dog at the 'Admiral Benbow'
 
 Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me
 to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, 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 hand-barrow - a tall, strong, heavy,
 nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder 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
 cover 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 mans 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.
 