Chapter 1. Nicholas Top
_ CHAPTER I. NICHOLAS TOP
My uncle, Nicholas Top, of Twist Tickle, was of a cut so grotesque that folk forgot their manners when he stumped abroad. Bowling through the streets of St. John‘s, which twice a year he tapped with staff and wooden leg, myself in leading--bowling cheerily, with his last rag spread, as he said, and be damned to the chart--he left a swirling wake of amazement: craning necks, open mouths, round eyes, grins so frank, the beholders being taken unaware, that ‘twas simple to distinguish hearts of pity from savage ones.
Small wonder they stared； my uncle was a broad, long-bodied, scowling, grim-lipped runt, with the arms and chest of an ape, a leg lacking, three fingers of the left hand gone at the knuckles, an ankle botched in the mending (the surgery his own), a jaw out of place, a round head set low between gigantic shoulders upon a thick neck: the whole forever clad in a fantastic miscellany of water-side slops, wrinkled above, w

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