The handwriting was plain and legible, though a lead pencil had been employed. It looked very much like a schoolboy’s hand, the letters being round and well formed. The writer had evidently written slowly and deliberately.
The reading was listened to with deep interest. The story ran thus:
“I wonder whether anyone will ever read these lines which I pen in my despair. I hope so, though when they are read I shall be beyond human help. Not that I am sick. I am well in body, but so unhappy that I have made up my mind when this record is completed to throw myself into the sea and end my captivity in the only way that seems practicable.
“Four years I have lived on this island in the completest solitude. Every day I have made a notch on a tree, which I selected for the purpose, as it was the only way of keeping tally of the time. The seasons are so much alike that the changes are not sufficient to be a guide to me.
“I have just been counting the notches I have made, and I find them to number fourteen hundred and sixty. That makes exactly four years, not making account of the extra day for leap year.
“But I must not make my preface too long. Let me say, then, that in the year 187—I set sail from Liverpool for Bombay, rating as an ordinary seaman. I had made other voyages, for I have been a sailor, man and boy, for twenty years, but I had no presentiment that this was to be the last and most disastrous.
“We had a good captain, a man who understood his business, strict, and yet kind. I always liked him, and got on well with him. I may say that I never sailed under a captain whom I more highly respected. His name was Clark——”
“Your name, Luke,” suggested Guy. “I don’t understand how, under such a captain, the poor fellow could have come to grief.”
“You will see further on.”
Luke Clark continued reading: