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41 books
William Clark Russell (24 February 1844 – 8 November 1911) was an English writer best known for his nautical novels. At the age of 13 Russell joined the United Kingdom's Merchant Navy, serving for eight years. The hardships of life at sea damaged his health permanently, but provided him with material for a career as a writer. He wrote short stories, press articles, historical essays, biographies and a book of verse, but was known best for his novels, most of which were about life at sea. He maintained a simultaneous career as a journalist, principally as a columnist on nautical subjects for The Daily Telegraph. Russell campaigned for better conditions for merchant seamen, and his work influenced reforms approved by Parliament to prevent unscrupulous ship-owners from exploiting their crews. His influence in this respect was acknowledged by the future King George V. Among Russell's contemporary admirers were Herman Melville, Algernon Swinburne and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Could it be possible that she was mad? That she had suddenly given life to a latent but pregnant seed of hereditary distemper—a strain in the family that had been concealed from him, a quality of intellectual structure of which the girl, and the mother herself, might have been ignorant as a part of the paternal or maternal legacy ? He had kissed her often. She had never repulsed him. They had often sat together alone in the twilight hand in hand. A couple are seldom married without certain happenings having gone before. Memories of the tender green of the May of love were sweet and scented between them. It was not to be supposed that she could forget all of a sudden. She must remember everything, though she gave no visible expression to recollection by dramatization of her mood. He felt that she should know better than to act like this. She was now his wife. She could not get away from that She had always been very willing to marry him. What in the devil's name had gone wrong with the fine creature ? Yet never was his love more consuming than whilst he walked to Chepstow Place with the beautiful, chaste, animated statue he had wedded.
Manifold are the historic interests of the river Thames. There is scarcely a foot of its mud from London Bridge to Gravesend Reach that is not as "consecrated" as that famous bit of soil which Dr. Samuel Johnson and Mr. Richard Savage knelt and kissed on stepping ashore at Greenwich