Excerpt from Captain Blood: His Odyssey Peter blood, bachelor of medicine and several other things besides, smoked a pipe and tended the geraniums boxed on the sill of his window above Water Lane in the town Of Bridgewater. Sternly disapproving eyes considered him from a window Opposite, but went disregarded. Mr. Blood's attention was divided between his task and the stream Of humanity in the narrow street below; a stream which poured for the second time that day towards Castle Field, where earlier in the after noon Ferguson, the Duke's chaplain, had preached a sermon containing more treason than divinity. These straggling, excited groups were mainly composed of men with green boughs in their hats and the most ludicrous of weapons in their hands. Some, it is true, shouldered fowling pieces, and here and there a sword was brandished; but more of them were armed with clubs, and most of them trailed the mammoth pikes fashioned out Of scythes, as formidable to the eye as they were clumsy to the hand. There were weavers, brewers, carpenters, smiths, masons, bricklayers, cobblers, and representatives of every other Of the trades Of peace among these improvised men Of war. Bridgewater, like Taunton, had yielded SO generously of its manhood to the service Of the bastard Duke that for any to abstain whose age and strength admitted of his bearing arms was to brand himself a coward or a papist. 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.