room in London. It was like this. In the very heart of the fern
clump, where the ferns were tallest, a little spring bubbled out of
the ground, at the rate, I suppose, of a pint of water in a minute. The
ferns grew immensely thick there; but someone had thinned out a few of
the roots from the ground, leaving the uprooted plant with the ferns
still living, to form a rough kind of thatch above a piece of earth big
enough for a man's body. In the scented shade of this thatch, with
the side of his face turned towards me, a big, rough, bearded man sat,
filing away some bright steel irons which were riveted on his ankles. He
swore continually in a low whisper as he worked, not even pausing in his
curses when he spat on to the hollow scraped in the irons by his file.
He was the fiercest looking savage of a man I have ever seen. His face
had a look of stern, gloomy cruelty which I shall never forget. His
general appearance was terrible; for he had a face burnt almost black by
the sun (some of it may have been mud) with a nasty white scar running
irregularly all down his left cheek, along the throat to the shoulder.
He was not what you might call naked, a naked man, such as I have seen
since in the hot countries, would have looked a nobleman beside him. He
wore a pair of dirty linen knickerbockers, all frayed into ribbons at
the knees, a pair of strong hide slippers bound to his ankles by strips
of leather, a part of a filthy red shirt without sleeves, a hat stolen
from a scarecrow, nothing else whatever, except the mud of many days'
gathering. His shirt was torn all down the back in a great slit which
he had tried to secure by what the sailors call "Bristol buttons," i.e.
pieces of string. The red flannel hung from him so as to show his back,
all criss-crossed with flogging scars. I knew at once from the irons
that he was a criminal escaped from gaol; but the criss-crossed scars
taught me that he was a criminal of the most terrible kind, probably one
who had shipped into the Navy to avoid hanging.

I took in a view of him before he saw me. His image was stamped on my
brain in less than ten seconds. In the eleventh second, I was lying on
my back in the gloom of the fern-growth, with this great ruffian on my
chest, squeezing me by my windpipe. I cannot say that he spoke to me. It
was not speech. It was the snarling wild beast gurgle which passes for
speech in the slums of our great cities, as though all the filth of a
low nature