* * * * *

_Peter Simple_ is printed from the first edition, in three volumes.
Saunders and Otley, 1834.

_The Three Cutters_ is printed from the first edition. Longman, Rees,
Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1836.

_The Three Cutters_ was first published in one volume with _The
Pirate_, containing a portrait of Marryat--Drawn by W. Behnes, engraved
by H. Cook; and "illustrated with twenty splendid engravings from
drawings by Clarkson Stanfield, Esq., R.A."

Peter Simple

Chapter I

The great advantage of being the fool of the family--My destiny is
decided, and I am consigned to a stockbroker as part of His Majesty's
sea stock--Unfortunately for me Mr Handycock is a bear, and I get
very little dinner.

If I cannot narrate a life of adventurous and daring exploits,
fortunately I have no heavy crimes to confess; and, if I do not rise in
the estimation of the reader for acts of gallantry and devotion in my
country's cause, at least I may claim the merit of zealous and
persevering continuance in my vocation. We are all of us variously
gifted from Above, and he who is content to walk, instead of to run, on
his allotted path through life, although he may not so rapidly attain
the goal, has the advantage of not being out of breath upon his arrival.
Not that I mean to infer that my life has not been one of adventure. I
only mean to say that, in all which has occurred, I have been a passive,
rather than an active, personage; and, if events of interest are to be
recorded, they certainly have not been sought by me.

As well as I can recollect and analyze my early propensities, I think
that, had I been permitted to select my own profession, I should in all
probability have bound myself apprentice to a tailor; for I always
envied the comfortable seat which they appeared to enjoy upon the
shopboard, and their elevated position, which enabled them to look down
upon the constant succession of the idle or the busy, who passed in
review before them in the main street of the country town, near to which
I passed the first fourteen years of my existence.

But my father, who was a clergyman of the Church of England, and the
youngest brother of a noble family, had a lucrative living, and a "soul
above buttons," if his son had not. It has been from time immemorial the
heathenish custom to sacrifice the greatest fool of the family to the
prosperity and naval superiority of the country, and,