Newton Forster by Frederick Marryat

"ORLANDO -- Then forbear your food a little while, While, like a doe, I go to find my fawn, And give it food. There is a poor old man Oppressed with two weak evils, age and hunger. " SHAKESPEARE.

Reader, were you ever really hungry? I do not mean the common hunger arising from health and exercise, and which you have the means of appeasing at the moment, when it may be considered a source of pleasure rather than of pain: -- I refer to the gnawing of starvation; because, if you have not been, you can form no conception of the agony of the suffering. Fortunately, but very few of my readers can have any knowledge of it; the general sympathy which it creates is from an ideal, not a practical knowledge. It has been my lot during the vicissitudes of a maritime life to have suffered hunger to extremity; and although impossible to express the corporeal agony, yet some notion of it may be conceived from the effect it had upon my mind. I felt that I hated the whole world, kin or no kin; that theft was a virtue, murder excusable, and cannibalism anything but disgusting; from which the inference may be safely drawn, viz., that I was devilish hungry.