Martin Rattler by Robert Michael Ballantyne
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Martin Rattler
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Title: Martin Rattler
Author: Robert Michael Ballantyne
Release Date: August 25, 2004 [EBook #13290]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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MARTIN RATTLER
BY R M BALLANTYNE
1858
EDITOR'S NOTE
"MARTIN RATTLER" was one of, Robert Michael Ballantyne's early books. Born at Edinburgh in 1825,[1] he was sent to Rupert's Land as a trading-clerk in the Hudson Bay Fur Company's service when he left school, a boy of sixteen. There, to relieve his home-sickness, he first practised his pen in long letters home to his mother. Soon after his return to Scotland in 1848 he published a first book on Hudson's Bay. Then he passed some years in a Scottish publisher's office; and in 1855 a chance suggestion from another publisher led to his writing his first book for boys--"Snowflakes and Sunbeams, or The Young Fur Traders." That story showed he had found his vocation, and he poured forth its successors to the tune in all of some fourscore volumes. "Martin Rattler" appeared in 1858. In his "Personal Reminiscences" Ballantyne wrote: "How many thousands of lads have an intense liking for the idea of a sailor's life!" an