strange to me, noticing the quiet hand, and noticing it (as I have done,
you know, so many times) a-fondling children and grandchildren asleep, to
think that when blood and honour were up--there! I won't! not at
present!--Scratch it out.

She won't scratch it out, and quite honourable; because we have made an
understanding that everything is to be taken down, and that nothing that
is once taken down shall be scratched out. I have the great misfortune
not to be able to read and write, and I am speaking my true and faithful
account of those Adventures, and my lady is writing it, word for word.

I say, there I was, a-leaning over the bulwarks of the sloop Christopher
Columbus in the South American waters off the Mosquito shore: a subject
of his Gracious Majesty King George of England, and a private in the
Royal Marines.

In those climates, you don't want to do much. I was doing nothing. I
was thinking of the shepherd (my father, I wonder?) on the hillsides by
Snorridge Bottom, with a long staff, and with a rough white coat in all
weathers all the year round, who used to let me lie in a corner of his
hut by night, and who used to let me go about with him and his sheep by
day when I could get nothing else to do, and who used to give me so
little of his victuals and so much of his staff, that I ran away from
him--which was what he wanted all along, I expect--to be knocked about
the world in preference to Snorridge Bottom. I had been knocked about
the world for nine-and-twenty years in all, when I stood looking along
those bright blue South American Waters. Looking after the shepherd, I
may say. Watching him in a half-waking dream, with my eyes half-shut, as
he, and his flock of sheep, and his two dogs, seemed to move away from
the ship's side, far away over the blue water, and go right down into the