I now saw for the first time how terribly worn and famished the man was: he looked like a wolf, and his white teeth were bare in his rage. He had cut his foot on the rock. Still keeping his evil eye upon me, he knelt down by the water's edge and began slowly to bathe the wound. "By the way, boy, what did you say your name was? Jasper? Jasper what?" "Trenoweth." "Ten thousand devils!" He was on his feet, and had gripped me by the shoulder with a furious clutch. I turned sick and cold with terror. The blue sky swam and circled around me: then came mist and black darkness, lit only by the gleam of two terrible eyes: a shout--and I knew no more. CHAPTER V. TELLS HOW THE SAILOR GEORGIO RHODOJANI GAVE EVIDENCE AT THE "LUGGER INN." I came gradually back to consciousness amid a buzz of voices. Uncle Loveday was bending over me, his every button glistening with sympathy, and his face full of kindly anxiety. What had happened, or how I came to be lying thus upon the sand, I could not at first remember, until my gaze, wandering over my uncle's shoulder, met the Captain's eyes regarding me with a keen and curious stare. He was standing in the midst of a small knot of fishermen, every now and then answering their questions with a gesture, a shrug of the shoulders, or shake of the head; but chiefly regarding my recovery and waiting, as I could see, for me to speak. "Poor boy!" said Uncle Loveday. "Poor boy! I suppose the sight of this man frightened him." I caught the Captain's eye, and nodded feebly. "Ah, yes, yes. You see," he explained, turning to the shipwrecked man, "your sudden appearance upset him: and to tell you the honest truth, my friend, in your present condition--in your present condition, mind you--your appearance is perhaps somewhat--startling. Shall we say, startling?" In answer to my uncle's apologetic hesitation the stranger merely spread out his palms and shrugged his shoulders. "Ah, yes. A foreigner evidently. Well, well, although our coast is not precisely hospitable, I believe its inhabitants are at any rate free from that reproach. Jasper, my boy, can you walk now? If so, Joseph here will see you home, and we will do our best for the--the-- foreign gentleman thus unceremoniously cast on our shores." My uncle seemed to regard magnificence of speech as the natural due of a foreigner: whether from some hazy conception of "foreign politeness," or a hasty deduction that what was not the language of one part of the world must be that of another, I cannot say. At any rate, the fishermen regarded him approvingly as the one man who could--if human powers were equal to it--extricate them from the present deadlock. "You do not happen, my friend, to be in a position to inform us whether any--pardon the expression--any corpses are now lying on the rocks to bear witness to this sad catastrophe?" Again the stranger made a gesture of perplexity.