On the heap of leaves sat the remnant of a man, a crooked skeleton in dirty rags, his face a parchment of wrinkles framed by a mass of whitening hair.  He looked ages old, his eyes small holes, red rimmed, his hands, in which he held a shaking piece of paper, foul claws.  His flesh, through his rags, was the deadly white of the morgue.  He looked a Thing no soul should animate.

“Ah!  Hemeury Francois,” said Le Vergose in the Breton dialect that recalled their childhood home, “I have brought an American to see you.  You can talk your English to him.”

“By damn, yes,” croaked the hermit, in the voice of a raven loosed from a deserted house.  But he made no movement until Le Vergose held before his bone-like nose a pint of strong Tahiti rum.  Far back in his eyes, away beyond the visible organs, there came a gleam of greater consciousness, a realization of life around him.  His mouth, like a rent in an old, battered purse, gaped, and though no teeth were there, the vacuity seemed to smile feebly.

He felt about the litter of paper and leaves and found a dirty cocoanut-shell and a calabash of water.  Shaking and gasping, he poured the bottle of rum into the shell, mixed water with it and lifted the precious elixir tremblingly to his lips.  He made two choking swallows, and dropped the shell—­empty.

His eyes, that had been lost in their raw sockets, scanned me.  Then in mixed French and English he began to talk of himself.  From his rags he produced a rude diary blocked off on scraps of paper, a minute record of the river and the weather, covering many years.

“Torrent, torrent, torrent.”  That word was repeated many tunes. Hause appeared often, signifying that the brook had risen.  Every day he had noted its state.  The river had become his god.  Alone among those shadowing, dripping banana-plants, with no human companionship, he had made his study of the moods of the stream a worship.  Pages and pages were inscribed with lines upon its state.

“Bacchus,” I saw repeated on the dates July 13, 14, 15.

“Another god on the altar then?” I asked. “Mais, oui,” he answered in his rusty voice.  “The Fall of the Bastile.  Le Vergose sent me a bottle of rum to honor the Republic.”

What he had just drunk was seething in him.  Little by little he commanded that long disused throat, he recalled from the depths of his uncertain mind words and phrases.  In short, jerky sentences, mostly French, he spun his tale.

“Brest is my home, in Finnistere.  I have been many years in these seas.  I forget how many.  How many years—? Sacre! I was on the Mongol.  She was two thousand tons, clipper, and with skysails.  The captain was Freeman.  We brought coals from Boston to San Francisco.  That was long ago.  I was young.  I was young and handsome.  And strong.  Yes, I was strong and young.

“That was it—­the Mongol.  A clipper-ship from Boston, two thousand tons, and with skysails.  Around the Horn it almost blew the sticks out of that Mongol.  We froze; we worked day and night.  It was terrible.  The seas almost drowned us.  Ah, how we cursed! Tonnerre de dieu! Had we known it we were in Paradise.  The inferno—­we were coming to the inferno.”