tar-nal snakes! Professor, how came you here?"

I turned slowly to see who had thus addressed me. It was a tall
individual at my side--long legged, very lean, and when he laughed it
sounded like a horse neighing. He was so very tall that I had not raised
my eyes far enough to see his face before he spoke again.

"Professor! ye sartainly give me a start. By the e-tar-nal snakes! I
could have taken my dying oath you wasn't north o' the cape o' the
Virgins. What you doin' yere in Maria Debora's?"

It began to be impressed on my mind with force that I was a good deal
like the little old woman of the nursery rhyme. I wondered whether this
was really me, or was it not me? My identity as Clinton Webb had been
denied at the consul's, and here a perfect stranger was calling me out
of my name--and he seemed insistent upon it, too!

CHAPTER XXIV

IN WHICH I GET ACQUAINTED WITH CAPTAIN ADONIRAM TUGG

The face I finally saw at the top of that beanpole figure was as long as
the moral law. Such a lank, cadaverous visage I don't think I had ever
seen before. The man was a human lath.

And so bronzed and toughened was his hide that he looked to be made out
of sole-leather. His mouth was a grim, post-box slit; his nose was a
high beak with such a hump on it that I thought it had been broken; but
his eyes were human--gray-blue, twinkling with innumerable humorous
wrinkles at the outer corners.

"By the e-tar-nal snakes!" he ejaculated when I had tipped back my head
so that he could really see my face. "You ain't the Professor at all!
Why, you're a boy!"

"I am not your friend, the Professor," I admitted.

"And the voice!" he muttered, staring down at me. "It's his voice. I
ain't put in my winters with him this last dozen years and more to be
mistook in his voice. Say, boy, who be you?"

"Clint Webb is my name," I replied.

"Where do you hail from?"

"Massachusetts. Late of the Scarboro whaling bark."

"How old be you?"

"Going on seventeen."

"Well," he puffed, with a windy sigh, "you look behind enough like the
Professor to be him. And your voice is jest like his--that I'll swear
to! You must be some related."

"I don't know that we've any scientists in the family," I said, with a
laugh. I rather liked the long-legged individual.

"Don't know nobody named Vose?" he asked.

"No-o. Don't think I do."

He slumped down upon the bench beside me and helped himself to beans.

"By the e-tar-nal snakes!" he mutt