And such was Bope Tarn; of all landlubbers, the most lubberly and most miserable.

A forlorn, stunted, hook-visaged mortal he was too; one of those whom you know at a glance to have been tried hard and long in the furnace of affliction.

His face was an absolute puzzle; though sharp and sallow, it had neither the wrinkles of age nor the smoothness of youth; so that for the soul of me, I could hardly tell whether he was twenty-five or fifty.
But to his history.

In his better days, it seems he had been a journeyman baker in London, somewhere about Holborn; and on Sundays wore a Hue coat and metal buttons, and spent his afternoons in a tavern, smoking his pipe and drinking his ale like a free and easy journeyman baker that he was.

But this did not last long; for an intermeddling old fool was the ruin of him.