Page:Cornelia Meigs--The island of Appledore.djvu/22

6 oddly-shaped little dwelling, so surrounded with trees and bushes that there was not much  to be seen of it except bits here and there: a  peering chimney, patches of red-stained roof,  a portion of gray wall and the front door  painted a bright, cheerful blue. Sloping away to the rocky point lay Captain Saulsby’s  garden, with its rows of vegetables and shrubs  and flowers. Captain Saulsby himself was sitting in an armchair on the wide, stone doorstep, but alas he did not look in the least as  Billy had expected.

He had pictured old sailors as being white-haired, but sturdy and upright, dressed in blue clothes and moving with a rolling walk or  sitting to stare out to sea through a brass telescope. Captain Saulsby’s hair was not exactly white, it was indeed no particular color on earth; he wore shabby overalls a world too  big even for his vast figure and he had carpet  slippers instead of picturesque sea-boots. Yet the flavour of the sea somehow clung to him  after all, brought out, perhaps, by the texture  of his face which was red and weather-beaten  with the skin wrinkled and thickened to the  consistency of alligator leather, and by his  huge rough hands that resembled nothing so