Excerpt from A Deadly Foe: A Romance of the Northern Seas It was also not the position which might have seemed most natural to him, for he came of a good family, many members of whom had served in the Royal Navy, and had bequeathed to him a love for a seafaring life, which even the merchant-service had failed to extinguish. But he was the sixth boy out of ten children of a not very wealthy country clergyman, and the Vicar of Combe was too sensible a man to set aside an evident vocation because it led his boy into scenes and among companions whose merit it was that they were honest, and whose fault it was not that they were unaristocratic. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.