Excerpt from Marooned: A Sea Tale I returned to my lodgings in London one night in June in the year eighteen hundred and something, and found a letter lying upon the table. It was from my cousin, Alexander Fraser, and was dated at Rio J aneiro. This was a man whom I had neither seen nor heard of for some years. We had been sent to sea as boys in the East India Company's servic and together had made three voyages in the same ship to Bom ay; which in those ambling days 0 trade, when a four months' passage to the Bay of Bengal was considered a good run, meant a long and intimate association. Through the death of my dear mother I tame into money enough to render me independent, and so I quitted old ocean after three years of seafarin Fraser made a fourth voyage and I then lost si ht of him. En later on I wrote to his Sisters in the north 0 Scotland, I was told he had left his ship at Bombay to accompan a tea-grower, who had been a passen er in the vessel, to his p antations. That was the last I heard 0 him. As I held his letter in my hand, memo recalled him as a fair, blue-eyed, bronzed young fellow, exc ingly good-lookin a very nimble and alert seaman, fitter for the navy indeed t an for the tea-waggon service, full of spirit and resolution and extremely impulsive. 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.