Excerpt from Heart of Oak, a Three-Stranded Yarn, Vol. 1 of 3 My father sat beside the fire reading a newspaper. His name was Sir Mortimer Otway he was fourth baronet and a colonel; had seen service in India, though he had long left the army to settle down upon his little seaside estate. He was a man of small fortune. Having said this, I need not trouble you with more of his family history. I was his only surviving child, and my name is Marie; I have no other Christian name than that; it was my mother's. My age was twenty and my health delicate, so much so that Captain and Mrs. Burke were coming from London expressly to talk over a scheme of my going round the world in their ship for the benefit of my appetite and spirits and voice, and perhaps for my lungs, though to be sure they were still sound at that date. 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.