Down to the Sea Author:Morgan Robertson General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1905 Original Publisher: McClure's Magazine and Metropolitan Magazine Subjects: Sea stories, American Fiction / General Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Fiction / Short Stories Literary Criticism / American / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR repri... more »nt of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: The Enemies HE was a young man -- not over twenty-four -- when I first met him. He came down the dock dressed in nondescript rags which, to the uninitiated, might stamp him as tramp or dock-rat; but to me, taken with his keen glance aloft at our rigging and his sure-footed jump from the string-piece to the fore - shrouds, they bespoke the deep-water sailor. He dropped to the deck, came straight to the galley door, and looked in. " Cook," he said, in the deep, raspy voice of strongly fibred men, "I'm hungry. Will you gi' me a bite? I'll saw wood, or peel taters, or -- anything at all." I had but a scant supply of kindling and a sprained wrist; so I set him at work. Later, as he ate his breakfast in the galley, I had a chance to study his face. It was a particularly ill - favored face -- not vicious at all, but ill-adjusted by nature -- disproportionate. Nothing was in harmony: his ears, though well shaped, stood straight out from his head; his mouth, neither large nor small, was made up of twovery thick lips, between which showed two irregular rows of strong, yellow teeth. His eyes were dark and steadfast, deep sunken in cavities topped by thick eyebrows that met over the nose; and his nose was the nose of a fighter, short, broad, and aquiline. But, as though to atone for her niggardly treatment of his face, Mother Nature had given him the figure and grace of an Apollo. Clearly this...« less