't bite to hurt. Ready?"

"Yes," said Vince, stretching out his hand. "Better let him go."

"Yes, because you don't want him. I do. Now, no games."

"All right."

"Up with the cap, then."

Vince lifted the cap, and burst out laughing, for it was like some
conjuring trick--the lizard was gone.

"Why, you never caught it!" he said.

"Yes, I did: you saw its tail. I've got it under my hand now."

"You've dropped it," cried Vince. "Lift up."

Mike raised his hand, and there, sure enough, was the lizard's tail,
writhing like a worm, and apparently as full of life as its late owner,
but, not being endowed with feet, unable to escape.

"Poor little wretch!" said Vince; "how horrid! But he has got away."

"Without his tail!"

"Yes; but that will soon grow again."

"Think so?"

"Why, of course it will: just as a crab's or lobster's claw does."

"Hullo, young gentlemen!" said a gruff voice, and a thick-set, elderly
man stopped short to look down upon them, his grim, deeply-lined brown
face twisted up into a smile as he took off an old sealskin cap and
began to softly polish his bald head, which was surrounded by a thick
hedge of shaggy grey hair, but paused for a moment to give one spot a
rub with his great rough, gnarled knuckles. His hands were enormous,
and looked as if they had grown into the form most suitable for grasping
a pair of oars to tug a boat against a heavy sea.

His dress was exceedingly simple, consisting of a coarsely-knitted blue
jersey shirt that might have been the great-grandfather of the one Vince
wore; and a pair of trousers, of a kind of drab drugget, so thick that
they would certainly have stood up by themselves, and so cut that they
came nearly up to the man's armpits, and covered his back and chest,
while the braces he wore were short in the extreme. To finish the
description of an individual who played a very important part in the
lives of the two island boys, he had on a heavy pair of fisherman's
boots, which might have been drawn up over his knees, but now hung
clumsily about his ankles, like those of smugglers in a penny picture,
as he stood looking down grimly, and slowly resettled his sealskin cap
upon his head.

"What are you two a-doing of?" he asked. "Nothing," said Mike shortly.

"And what brings you round here?"

"I've been taking Jemmy Carnach a bottle of physic; and we came round,"
cried Vince. "Why?"

"Taking Jemmy Carnach a bottle of physic," said the