Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TO THE HESITATING PURCHASER If sailor tales to sailor tunes, Storm and adventure, heat and cold, If schooners, islands, and maroons And Buccaneers and buried Gold, And all the old romance, retold Exactly in the ancient way, Can please, as me they pleased of old, The wiser youngsters of today: ?So be it, and fall on If not, If studious youth no longer crave, His ancient appetites forgot, Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave, Or Cooper of the wood and wave; So be it, also And may I And all my pirates share the grave Where these and their creations lie TREASURE ISLAND THE OLD BUCCANEER CHAPTER I THE OLD SEA DOG AT THE Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17?, and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof. I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember .him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards: ? Fifteen men on the dead man's chest? Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned a...