Seawrack Author:Frank Thomas Bullen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MARTHA, THE COOK-GENERAL Joe Witherby, first-class A.B. on board H.M.S. 8t. George, sauntered out of the sick bay as if he had just been treating himself to a... more » dose of salts, as is the custom of many staunch seamen, for prophylactic purposes, now and then. A chum, of observant habits, might have noticed trouble in Joe's keen blue eyes, but no stranger could have done so. Yet he had just received the death-blow to his career as a bluejacket, his dismissal from a service which, with all its drawbacks, he loved in a way that few landsmen understand. The surgeon had found him incurable, a sufferer from an obscure disease which might let him live to be a hundred, or stretch him a corpse at any moment, a disease, too, which absolutely precluded the idea of such violent exercise as bluejackets must continually be subjected to. A tiny pension, about enough to keep him in tobacco, and ten pounds of back pay, were all that he could call his resources after hia twelve years' faithful service, mostly in tropical seas, whose fierce heats and debilitating hardships had made him look ten years older than his twenty-seven. During the next few days intervening between his sentence and its infliction, Joe did some powerful thinking. What was he going to do for a living? Handy man, as he certainly was at sea, he knew himself for an unskilled labourer ashore, and that marketwas much overstocked. This he knew, for he was an ardent reader of newspapers, and, besides, he had been warned to avoid any heavy exertion. Whichever way he looked he saw " no thoroughfare," until one day, sitting in his cramped little lodging at Fratton, he happened to be glancing down the " Want Servants " columns of the Daily Telegraph, and noticed that there were just forty-five almost agonized appeals for a " cook-general"...« less