“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 GoldAnd all the old romance, retold, Exactly in the ancient way,Can please, as me they pleased of old, The wiser youngsters of to-day:-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 IAnd all my pirates share the grave, Where these and their creations lie!”

“REQUIEMUnder the wide and starry skyDig the grave and let me lie:Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me:Here he lies where he long'd to be;Home is the sailor, home from the sea,And the hunter home from the hill.”

“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 shoulder 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 cover and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:”

“Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought, sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us, but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange as our actual adventures.”

“Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debateare as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements andalarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and itfell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of myfellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in thestrength to keep to it.”

“The FlowersAll the names I know from nurse:Gardener's garters, Shepherd's purse,Bachelor's buttons, Lady's smock,And the Lady Hollyhock.Fairy places, fairy things,Fairy woods where the wild bee wings,Tiny trees for tiny dames--These must all be fairy names!Tiny woods below whose boughsShady fairies weave a house;Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme,Where the braver fairies climb!Fair are grown-up people's trees,But the fairest woods are these;Where, if I were not so tall,I should live for good and all”

“This Mr Thomson seems a gentleman of some choice qualities, though perhaps a trifle bloody-minded. It would please me none the worse, if (with all his merits) he were soused in the North Sea; for the man, Mr Balfour, is a sore embarrassment. ”