Sentence No. 44 · 10 May 2026
hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson — Treasure Island (1883) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
The phrase "a dirty, livid white" is an appositive — a noun phrase dropped after a comma to rename or describe what came just before. Appositives always follow the thing they describe, so this phrase can never open the sentence.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 6 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. Jim Hawkins describes the old buccaneer who came to stay at his father's inn — and who would change his life forever. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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