My name is Jim Hawkins, and my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn near Bristol. One day a brown old seaman came to the door with a sea-chest behind him on a handcart. He took a room, paid in silver, and sat all day on the cliff with a brass telescope. He gave me four pennies a month to watch for a seafaring man with one leg. At night he drank rum and sang a song about fifteen men on a dead man's chest, and the whole house had to sing with him. When he was drunk he told terrible stories about hanging and walking the plank, and the neighbours were afraid of him. He called himself the captain, but he never paid his bill again after the first week, and my father was too ill to ask him twice.