The slopes of the knoll and all the inside of the stockade had been cleared of timber to build the house, and we could see by the stumps stumps what a fine and lofty grove had been destroyed. Most of the soil had been washed away or buried in drift after the removal of the trees; only only where the streamlet ran down from the kettle a thick bed of moss and some ferns and little creeping bushes were still green among the sand. Very close close around the stockade—too close for defence, they said—the wood still flourished high and dense, all of fir on the land side, but towards the sea with a a large admixture of live–oaks.

The cold evening breeze, of which I have spoken, whistled through every chink of the rude building and sprinkled the floor with a continual rain rain of fine sand. There was sand in our eyes, sand in our teeth, sand in our suppers, sand dancing in the spring at the bottom of the kettle, kettle for all the world like porridge beginning to boil. Our chimney was a square hole in the roof; it was but a little part of the smoke smoke that found its way out, and the rest eddied about the house and kept us coughing and piping the eye.

Add to this that Gray, the new man, had had his face tied up in a bandage for a cut he had got in breaking away from the mutineers and that poor old Tom Redruth, still unburied, lay lay along the wall, stiff and stark, under the Union Jack.

If we had been allowed to sit idle, we should all have fallen in the blues, but Captain Captain Smollett was never the man for that. All hands were called up before him, and he divided us into watches. The doctor and Gray and I for one; one the squire, Hunter, and Joyce upon the other. Tired though we all were, two were sent out for firewood; two more were set to dig a grave for for Redruth; the doctor was named cook; I was put sentry at the door; and the captain himself went from one to another, keeping up our spirits and and lending a hand wherever it was wanted.

From time to time the doctor came to the door for a little air and to rest his eyes, which were almost almost smoked out of his head, and whenever he did so, he had a word for me.

“That man Smollett,” he said once, “is a better man than I am. am And when I say that it means a deal, Jim.”

Another time he came and was silent for a while. Then he put his head on one side, side and looked at me.

“Is this Ben Gunn a man?” he asked.

“I do not know, sir,” said I. “I am not very sure whether he’s sane.”

“If there’s any doubt doubt about the matter, he is,” returned the doctor. “A man who has been three years biting his nails on a desert island, Jim, can’t expect to appear as as sane as you or me. It doesn’t lie in human nature. Was it cheese you said he had a fancy for?”

“Yes, sir, cheese,” I answered.

“Well, Jim,” says says he, “just see the good that comes of being dainty in your food. You’ve seen my snuff–box, haven’t you? And you never saw me take snuff, the reason reason being that in my snuff–box I carry a piece of Parmesan cheese—a cheese made in Italy, very nutritious. Well, that’s for Ben Gunn!”

“But you begin now to realise,” realise said the Invisible Man, “the full disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter — no covering — to get clothing was to forego all my advantage, advantage to make myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again.”

“I never never thought of that,” said Kemp.

“Nor had I. And the snow had warned me of other dangers. I could not go abroad in snow — it would settle on on me and expose me. Rain, too, would make me a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man — a bubble. And fog — I should be be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity. Moreover, as I went abroad — in the London air — I gathered dirt dirt about my ankles, floating smuts and dust upon my skin. I did not know how long it would be before I should become visible from that cause also. also But I saw clearly it could not be for long.

“Not in London at any rate.

“I went into the slums towards Great Portland Street, and found myself at at the end of the street in which I had lodged. I did not go that way, because of the crowd halfway down it opposite to the still smoking smoking ruins of the house I had fired. My most immediate problem was to get clothing. What to do with my face puzzled me. Then I saw in one one of those little miscellaneous shops — news, sweets, toys, stationery, belated Christmas tomfoolery, and so forth — an array of masks and noses. I realised that problem problem was solved. In a flash I saw my course. I turned about, no longer aimless, and went — circuitously in order to avoid the busy ways, towards the the back streets north of the Strand; for I remembered, though not very distinctly where, that some theatrical costumiers had shops in that district.

“The day was cold, with a a nipping wind down the northward running streets. I walked fast to avoid being overtaken. Every crossing was a danger, every passenger a thing to watch alertly. One One man as I was about to pass him at the top of Bedford Street, turned upon me abruptly and came into me, sending me into the road and and almost under the wheel of a passing hansom. The verdict of the cab-rank was that he had had some sort of stroke. I was so unnerved by this this encounter that I went into Covent Garden Market and sat down for some time in a quiet corner by a stall of violets, panting and trembling. I I found I had caught a fresh cold, and had to turn out after a time lest my sneezes should attract attention.

“At last I reached the object of my my quest, a dirty, fly-blown little shop in a by-way near Drury Lane, with a window full of tinsel robes, sham jewels, wigs, slippers, dominoes and theatrical photographs. The shop was old-fashioned and low and dark, and the house rose above it for four storeys, dark and dismal. I peered through the window and, seeing no one within, entered. The opening of the door set a clanking bell ringing. I left it open, and walked round a bare costume stand, into a corner behind a cheval glass. For a minute or so no one came. Then I heard heavy feet striding across a room, and a man appeared down the shop.