offender is put ashore with a little powder and shot and left behind on some desolate and distant island.
“Marooned three years agone,” he continued, “and lived on goats since then, and berries and oysters. Wherever a man is, says I, a man can do for himself. But, mate, my heart is sore for Christian diet. You mightn’t happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese—toasted, mostly—and woke up again, and here I were.”
“If ever I can get aboard again,” said I, “you shall have cheese by the stone.”
All this time he had been feeling the stuff of my jacket, smoothing my hands, looking at my boots, and generally, in the intervals of his speech, showing a childish pleasure in the presence of a fellow-creature. But at my last words he perked up into a kind of startled slyness.
“If ever you get aboard again, says you?” he repeated. “Why, now, who’s to hinder you?”
“Not you, I know,” was my reply.
“And right you was,” he cried. “Now you—what do you call yourself, mate?”
“Jim,” I told him.
“Jim, Jim,” says he, quite pleased, apparently. “Well, now, Jim, I’ve lived that rough as you’d be ashamed to hear of. Now, for instance, you wouldn’t think I had had a pious mother—to look at me?” he asked.
“Why, no, not in particular,” I answered.
“Ah, well,” said he, “but I had—remarkable pious. And I was a civil, pious boy, and could rattle off my catechism that fast as you couldn’t tell