Such a suggestion I had derived from the circumstances of Mr. Lovyes.  He had passed an adventurous youth, during which he had for eight years been held to slavery by a negro tribe on the Gambia river; he had afterwards amassed a considerable fortune, and embarked it in the ventures of the Company; he had thereupon withdrawn himself to Tresco, where he had lived for twenty years:  so much any man might know without provocation to his curiosity.  The strange feature of Mr. Lovyes’ conduct was revealed to me by the ledgers.  For during all those years he had drawn neither upon his capital nor his interest, so that his stake in the Company grew larger and larger, with no profit to himself that any one could discover.  It seemed to me, in fact, clean against nature that a man so rich should so disregard his wealth; and I busied myself upon the journey with discovering strange reasons for his seclusion, of which none, I may say, came near the mark, by so much did the truth exceed them all.

I landed at the harbour of New Grimsey, on Tresco, in the grey twilight of a September evening; and asking for Mr. Lovyes, was directed across a little ridge of heather to Dolphin Town, which lies on the eastward side of Tresco, and looks across Old Grimsey Sound to the island of St. Helen’s.  Dolphin Town, you should know, for all its grand name, boasts but a poor half-score of houses dotted about the ferns and bracken, with no semblance of order.  One of the houses, however, attracted my notice—­first, because it was built in two storeys, and was, therefore, by a storey taller than the rest; and, secondly, because all its windows were closely shuttered, and it wore in that falling light a drooping, melancholy aspect, like a derelict ship upon the seas.  It stood in the middle of this scanty village, and had a little unkempt garden about it inclosed within a wooden paling.  There was a wicket-gate in the paling, and a rough path from the gate to the house door, and a few steps to the right of this path a well was sunk and rigged with a winch and bucket.  I was both tired and thirsty, so I turned into the garden and drew up some water in the bucket.  A narrow track was beaten in the grass between the well and the house, and I saw with surprise that the stones about the mouth of the well were splashed and still wet.  The house, then, had an inmate.  I looked at it again, but the shutters kept their secret:  there was no glimmer of light visible through any chink.  I approached the house, and from that nearer vantage discovered that the shutters were common planks fitted into the windows and nailed fast to the woodwork from without.  Growing yet more curious, I marched to the door and knocked, with an inquiry upon my tongue as to where Mr. Lovyes lived.  But the excuse was not needed; the sound of my blows echoed through the house in a desolate, solitary fashion, and no step answered them.  I knocked again, and louder.  Then I leaned my ear to the panel, and I distinctly