“’Tis hard for me to call home exactly what Matthew Damian looked like then, for ’tis above thirty year ago, an’ that man filled my eye every day, winter an’ summer, for twenty years. Yet, though he looks different now, with all I know behind my mind’s eye as I see him, then he ’peared mighty strange, wild an’ shaggy. A face like a round shot he had, but a terrible deep jaw under the ear. A little chin, round eyes—grey-green—an’ ears standing sharp off a close-cropped head, wi’ hair pepper-an’-salt colour. A huge, tall man, an’ his beard was cut to his chin, an’ his moustache stuck out like a bush five inches to port an’ starboard. Well, I was mortal feared, for I’d never seen nothing like un outside a nightmare; yet his voice was so thin as a boy’s, an’ piped like a reed in his thick throat. He had the nigger whine, too—as I dare say you may mark on my tongue now, after my ears have soaked in it so long. “He stared an’ I stared. Then he spoke. ‘You come along with me,’ he said in a Frenchy sort of English. “‘Why for?’ I said; then I thought I seed his eyes ’pon the pomegranate. ‘Very sorry, sir, if this here be yours,’ I said; ‘but I’m baggered if a chap can tell what be wild an’ what ban’t on this here ridicklous island. ’Tis like a gentleman’s hothouse broke loose,’ I said to un. “‘No matter about that,’ he said. “‘I can give ’e my knife,’ I told un, ‘if you must have payment; but that be all I’ve got in the world ’cept the things I stand up in, an’ I’d a deal rather keep it.’ “‘I do not want your knife,’ he answers. ‘I want you.’ “‘Well, I’m going cheap, I do assure ’e,’ I said, thinking I’d try how a light heart would serve me. But I weren’t comfortable by a long way, ’cause there’s a lot of madness in them islands, an’ I thought as this chap might be three-halfpence short of a shilling, as we say. However, he was too busy thinking to laugh at my poor fun, an’ for that matter, as I found after, he never laughed easy,—nor talked easy for that matter. Now he fell silent, an’ I walked by him. Then, after a stretch through a reg’lar Garden of Eden, wi’out our first parents, us comed upon a lovely house, whitewashed home to the roof—like snow in all that butivul green. ’Pon sight of it the man spoke again. “‘I want you to talk to my mother,’ he said suddenly. ‘You’ll just talk and talk in an easy way, as you was talking to yourself when I found you.’ “‘I be only a sailor-man, wi’ nought to say to a lady,’ I told him. “‘No matter for that,’ he said. ‘Just talk straight on. It do not signify a bit what you say, so you speak natural. In fact, talk to my mother as if madame was your own mother.’ “So then, of course, I reckoned the cat-faced chap was out of his mind—as who wouldn’t have?