The Watchers; a novel

Excerpt: ...through the puffs of tobacco, and his voice roaring out those wild stories of the African coast. That anxiety for a barbaric funeral seemed quite of a piece with the man as my fancies sketched him. Well, he was lying in the Abbey grounds, and George Glen sat in his place. Mr. Glen came over to me from his corner, and I called for a jug of rum punch, and invited him to share it, which he willingly did. He was a little squabby man, but very broad, with a nervous twitting laugh, and in his manner he was extremely intimate and confidential. He could hardly finish a sentence without plucking you by the sleeve, and every commonplace he uttered was pointed with a wink. He knew that I had been over at the house under Merchant's Rock, and he was clumsily inquisitive about my business upon Tresco. "Why," said I, indifferently, "I take it that I am pretty much in the same case with you, Mr. Glen." At that his jaw dropped a little, and he stared at me utterly discountenanced that I should be so plain with him. "As for me," said he in a little, "it is plain enough. And when you say"--and here he twitched my sleeve as he leaned across the table--"'here's old George Glen, that battered about the world in ships for fifty years, and has come to his moorings in a snug harbor where rum's cheap, being smuggled or stole', says you--well, I am not denying you may be right;" and here he winked prodigiously. "And that's just what I said," I returned; "for here have I battered about London, that's worse than the sea, and ages a man twice as fast----" Mr. Glen interrupted me with some astonishment, and, I thought, a little alarm. "Why," says she, "this is no place for the likes of you--a crazy tumbledown of a tavern. All very well for tarry sailor folk that's never seen nothing better than forecastle. But you'll sicken of it in a week. Sure, you have not dropped your anchor here."...