I wish Mr Martin at the Devil. It is not that he is not the most obliging gentlemanly fellow, as you know very well, but he does take up so much of Stephen’s time that I scarcely see anything of him.
I should have liked to run through the score of this evening’s piece with him, but they are gnattering away in the mizentop twenty to the dozen and I do not like to break in. To be sure, it is the usual fate of the captain of a man-of-war to live in solitary splendour, relieved only by some more or less obligatory and formal entertainment on one side or the other; but I have grown so used to the luxury of having a particular friend aboard these many commissions past that I feel quite bereft when it is taken from me.
–The Nutmeg of Consolation, Patrick O’Brian
