About an hour before sunset, the men were lounging under the awning which we had set, fore and aft, some of them fishing in the clear water beneath us, when, on a sudden, there was a great cry of astonishment raised; and looking up from the chart which I was studying, I saw a strange little man, so small, he might almost be called a dwarf, deliberately climbing over the taffrail. A dozen of our seamen rushed to lay hold of him, but he waved his hand, as though there was no necessity for violence, and jumped lightly down on deck. ‘Where is the captain of this ship?’ quoth he, in a strange shrill cracked voice, and speaking English with a slight foreign accent. At this moment, Captain Jem came out of the main cabin and stared heartily, as indeed we all did, to see so unexpected and strange-looking a visitor. The creature—who was so queer and dwarfish a man, that, as I gazed upon him, I thought of old-world stories of Brownies and uncanny men of the moors—could not have been above four feet high. He had very broad shoulders, and such long muscular arms, that they looked like fore legs of an ape. His face was big and broad, but not by any means ugly. He had light blue twinkling eyes and long fair hair, and a beard of a flaxen colour. The little man’s dress was as strange as himself. He wore a broad hat, made of great ribbons of strong green sea-weed, very neatly plaited and wrought. He had a linen shirt, not of the cleanest, with a cloth cloak hanging round his loins, and bound with a broad belt of similar sea-weed to that which formed his hat, while on his legs, which were very short and thick, he wore a pair of coarse canvas drawers. His great brown splay feet were bare. When I say that this strange-looking apparition had a sort of necklace of coral, mixed with small pieces of gold and silver money hung round his neck; that his ears were weighed down with big silver rings; and that in his hand he carried a paddle, with a broad blade at each end, I have fully described to the reader the stranger who now advanced towards Captain Jem, pulling off his hat, and making a very polite bow. Not to be behindhand in good breeding, Stout Jem was nothing loth to return the salaam; after which, he asked the little man how the devil he had come on board. ‘Look over the side and you will see,’ quoth the dwarf. We all rushed to the bulwark, and there sure enough was a light canoe most beautifully constructed, floating, as it appeared, on the very top of the water. ‘Well, sir,’ quoth Captain Jem, ‘you seem a countryman of the most of us here, and you are very welcome. I can’t help, however, thinking that you must have dropped from the moon. Mayhap you are the man in it.’ The dwarf waved his hand very impatiently, as who should say, a truce with your idle jeers, and then quoth he very solemnly—‘I am a pilot.’ At this we all listened greedily enough.