His brown, stiff, close-cropped hair needed no cropping at the top, where it thinned away to a shining curve.

His skin too was intersected by a thousand fine wrinkles, lacing and interlacing, and was all burned, as I have already said, by the sun.

Yet he was as lithe as a boy, and he was as tough as whalebone, walking all day over the hills or rowing on the sea without turning a hair.

On the whole we thought that he might be about forty or forty-five, though it was hard to see how he could have seen so much of life in the time.

But one day we got talking of ages, and then he surprised us.
I had been saying that I was just twenty, and Jim said that he was twenty-seven.
"Then I am the most old of the three," said de Lapp.
We laughed at this, for by our reckoning he might almost have been our father.
"But not by so much," said he, arching his brows.