which the ruins stood; and there, in a broad square hollow before me, was the welcome living green of a flourishing plantation of cocoanut palms!  It was evidently of considerable extent—­a quarter of a mile or so, I judged—­and the palms were very thick and planted close together.  To my surprise, too, I observed, as at length the path brought me to them after a sharp descent, that they were fenced in by a high bamboo stockade, for the most part in good condition, but here and there broken down with decay.

Through one of these gaps I presently made my way, and found myself among the soaring columns of the palms, hung aloft with clusters of the great green nuts.  Fallen palm fronds made a carpet for my feet—­very pleasant after the rough and tangled way I had travelled, and now and again one of the cocoa nuts would fall down with a thud amid the green silence.  One of these, which narrowly missed my head, suggested that here I had the opportunity of quenching very agreeably the thirst of which I had become suddenly aware.  My claspknife soon made an opening through the tough shell, and, seated on the ground, I set my mouth to it, and, raising the nut above my head, allowed the “milk”—­cool as spring water—­to gurgle deliciously down my parched throat.  When at length I had drained it, and my head once more returned to its natural angle, I was suddenly made aware that my poaching had not gone unobserved.

“Ha! ha!” called a pleasant voice, evidently belonging to a man of an unusually tall and lean figure who was approaching me through the palm trunks; “so you have discovered my hidden paradise—­my Alcinoues garden, so to say”; and he quoted two well-known lines of Homer in the original Greek, adding:  “or if you prefer it in Pope’s translation, which I think,—­don’t you?—­remains the best: 

    “Close to the gates a spacious garden lies,
    From storms defended and inclement skies—­

“and so on.  Alas! for an old man’s memory!  It grows shorter and shorter—­like his life, eh?  Never mind, you are welcome, sir stranger, mysteriously tossed up here like Ulysses, on our island coast.”

I gazed with natural wonderment at this strange individual, who thus in the heart of the wilderness had saluted me with a meticulously pure English accent, and welcomed me in a quotation from Homer in the original Greek.  Who, in the devil’s name, was this odd character who, I saw, as I looked closer at him, was, as he had hinted, quite an old man, though his unusual erectness and sprightliness of manner, lent him an illusive air of youth?  Who on earth was he?—­and how did he happen in the middle of this haunted wood?

CHAPTER V

Calypso.

Of course a glance, and the first sound of his voice, had told me that I had to do with a gentleman, one of those vagabond English gentlemen in exile who form a type peculiar, I think, to the English race; men that are a curious combination of aristocrat and gipsy, soldier, scholar, and philosopher; men of good family, who have drifted everywhere, seen and seen through everything, but in all their wanderings have never lost their sense and habit of “form,” their boyish zest in living, their humorous stoicism, and, above all, their lordly accent.