Women stared from the doors of the houses and the children had apparently gone into hiding.
The village knew the ship by sight, afar off, but no stranger had landed on that spot perhaps for a hundred years or more.

The cocked hat of Mr.
Byrne, the bushy whiskers and the enormous pigtail of the sailor, filled them with mute wonder.

They pressed behind the two Englishmen staring like those islanders discovered by Captain Cook in the South Seas.
It was then that Byrne had his first glimpse of the little cloaked man in a yellow hat.

Faded and dingy as it was, this covering for his head made him noticeable.
The entrance to the wine shop was like a rough hole in a wall of flints.
The owner was the only person who was not in the street, for he came out from the darkness at the back where the inflated forms of wine skins hung on nails could be vaguely distinguished.

He was a tall, one-eyed Asturian with scrubby, hollow cheeks; a grave expression of countenance contrasted enigmatically with the roaming restlessness of his solitary eye.