and made for it an inscription: "Considering the great love of his Excellency Tusitala in his loving care of us in our tribulation we have made this great gift; it shall never be muddy, it shall go on forever, this road that we have dug."

Is it not like a return of the days of the old heroes, of Ulysses and Aeneas, with their care of their people, their teaching of the ways of peace and honest labor, and their telling of tales?

"It shall go on forever, this road that we have dug."

So this series of hero-stories goes on forever. It is told now of Ulysses, again of Aeneas; again, at the dim beginning of our English race, of Beowulf. It is told of Walter Scott. It is told of Robert Louis Stevenson. It applies, you see, not merely to the stories themselves. "The Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson" fill quite a bit of space in our libraries. They fill quite a bit of space in our hearts. But they fill this space because Tusitala lived

the life of a hero. Like Ulysses, like Aeneas, he was struck by adverse fates. He was an exile and a wanderer. His life was one long struggle against disease, as theirs were long struggles in war and banishment. Like them, he joyed in the struggle.

And now what was this hidden treasure that Robert Louis Stevenson, like Jim Hawkins, went out to find? The pirates he met were not those that we meet in the story. Rather, they were the same under other names. The hidden treasure was not gold buried under a giant tree, to be found only if you read accurately a queer map. What it was is for you to determine. Some might say it was health, that he found for a few brief years before he died. Some might say that it was fame. It might be adventure, for his life, like his stories, was crowded with adventure: strange cities, strange faces, strange modes of life, and always a battle, cheerfully borne, against the foe that killed him at last. Again, it might be happiness. this hidden treasure.

In a prayer that he wrote, he said that he wished he and those he loved might wake "with morning faces and with morning hearts eager to labor-eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion-and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it." There are other answers that might be given. But the story of his life shows how a man may realize himself, that is, how he may make real and concrete the thing that he was born to express. His father and his grandfather were distinguished engineers. Perhaps he would have

become an engineer, or a lawyer, or a historian, if it had not been for the seeming handicap of health. In his letters, among the most beautiful in the English language, you may read how bravely he met this handicap. Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise, forcing him into becoming Tusitala instead of engineer or lawyer. There was a hidden treasure for which he searched, always watched by a foe that was more evil than Captain Flint, the Blind Man, or Silver, and this treasure he found.

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—, 10 and go back to the time when my father kept the "Admiral Benbow" inn, and the brown old seaman, with the saber 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 20 tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders

of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the saber cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I re

member 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 chestYo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

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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 40 on the taste, and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.

"This is a handy cove," says he, at length; "and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?" My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.

"Well, then," said he, "this is the berth for me. Here you, matey," 50

34. broken at the capstan bars, see line 11, page 115.

he cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help up my chest. I'll stay here a bit," he continued. "I'm a plain man; rum and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch ships off. What you mought call me? You mought call me captain. Oh, I see what you're at-there"; and 10 he threw down three or four gold pieces on the threshold. "You can tell me when I've worked through that," says he, looking as fierce as a commander.

And, indeed, bad as his clothes were, and coarsely as he spoke, he had none of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast; but seemed like a mate or skipper, accustomed to be 20 obeyed or to strike. The man who came with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at the "Royal George"; that he had inquired what inns there were along the coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence. And that was all we could learn of our guest.

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He was a very silent man by custom. All day he hung round the cove, or upon the cliffs, with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner of the parlor next the fire, and drank rum and water very strong. Mostly he would not speak when spoken to; only look up sudden and fierce, and blow through his nose like a foghorn; and we and the people who came about 40 our house soon learned to let him be. Every day, when he came back from his stroll, he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the road. At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind that made him ask this question; but at last we began to see he was desirous to avoid them. When a seaman put up at the "Admiral Benbow" (as now and then

some did, making by the coast road 50 for Bristol), he would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the parlor; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such was present. For me, at least, there was no secret about the matter; for I was, in a way, a sharer in his alarms. He had taken me aside one day, and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every 60 month if I would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg," and let him know the moment he appeared. Often enough, when the first of the month came round, and I applied to him for my wage, he would only blow through his nose at me, and stare me down; but before the week was out he was sure to think better of it, bring me my four- 70 penny piece, and repeat his orders to look out for "the seafaring man with one leg."

How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house, and the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical so expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares. And altogether I paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these 90 abominable fancies.

But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who knew him. There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water than his head would carry; and

then he would sometimes sit and sing his wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call for glasses round, and force all the trembling company to listen to his stories or bear a chorus to his singing. Often I have heard the house shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum"; all the neighbors joining in for 10 dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing louder than the other, to avoid remark. For in these fits he was the most overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question, or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not following 20 his story. Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they were; about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his own account he must have lived his 30 life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea; and the language in which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over and put down, and sent shivering to their 40 beds; but I really believe his presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country life; and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to admire him, calling him a "true sea dog," and a "real old salt," and such-like names, and saying

25. walking the plank, walking blindfold on a plank which tipped the victim into the sea.

there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.

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In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us; for he kept on staying week after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had been long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to insist on having more. If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through his nose so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor father 60 out of the room. I have seen him wringing his hands after such a rebuff and I am sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have greatly hastened his early and unhappy death.

All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in his dress but to buy some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of 70 his hat having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it was a great annoyance when it blew. I remember the appearance of his coat, which he patched himself upstairs 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 neighbors, and with these, for the 80 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 toward 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 parlor to smoke a pipe 90 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

96. powder as white as snow, an allusion to the custom of powdering the hair or the wig.