My clothes beginning to wear out, my kind host, who was an excellent tailor, made me a pair of trousers consisting of sail cloth and the rear of dried goat’s skin, the hair outside, which they all assured me would be very convenient in sliding down the mountains. I laughed heartily when I first sported this Robinson Crusoe habiliment. “Never mind how you look, sir,” said my kind host, “His Majesty himself, God bless him, if he had been left here as you were, could look no better.” Governor William Glass ruled over the island for thirty-five years, until his death in 1853. By that time the population had increased to a hundred souls, and a flourishing trade was carried on in provisioning the fleet of American whalers out of New Bedford and Nantucket which cruised in those waters. A few years later, twenty-five of the younger men and women emigrated to the United States, stirred by a natural ambition to see more of the world. At the death of Governor Glass, an old man-of-war’s-man, William Cotton, who had been for three years one of Napoleon’s guards at St. Helena, became the head of the community. To-day the settlement consists of a hundred people or so, most of them of the old British strain, and many of them descended from the families of Corporal William Glass of the Royal Artillery and the young seaman Stephen White and his devoted Peggy who were wrecked in the _Blenden Hall_, East Indiaman, a century ago. They manage their own affairs without any written laws, and are described by recent visitors as religious, hospitable to strangers, industrious, healthy, and long-lived. The British Government has kept a paternal eye on them, and from time to time a minister of the Church of England has served in the stone chapel and the trim little school-house. Their worldly wealth is in cattle, sheep, apple and peach orchards, and they are unvexed by politics, the League of Nations, or the social unrest. Enviable people of Tristan da Cunha! And peace to the memories of old William Glass and Jonathan Lambert, and the faithful sweethearts of the stately old _Blenden Hall_! CHAPTER V THE ADVENTURES OF DAVID WOODARD, CHIEF MATE