Jack Aubrey on Valued Servants

Every captain in the Royal Navy had his personal steward, a manservant responsible for attending to his clothing and anything else he needed. Jack’s steward is an old seadog named Preserved Killick, a man of rude habits, a grumpy disposition, and a tendency to raid the Captain’s stores for dainties, but also a man of great and undoubted loyalty. This passages follows after a particularly positive evidence of Killick’s devotion to his Captain’s needs:

Killick was in many ways a wretched servant, fractious, mean, overbearing to guests of inferior rank, hopelessly coarse; but in others he was a pearl without a thorn. For a moment Jack passed some other expressions in review, and having reached bricks without price he went to sleep.

— Patrick O’Brian, The Nutmeg of Consolation