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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: proficiency marked him out and procured him some alleviations.
Admiral Plampin had succeeded Napoleon at the Briars; and here he
had young Jenkin staying with him to make sketches of the historic
house. One of these is before me as I write, and gives a strange
notion of the arts in our old English Navy. Yet it was again as an
artist that the lad was taken for a run to Rio, and apparently for
a second outing in a ten-gun brig. These, and a cruise of six
weeks to windward of the island undertaken by the CONQUEROR herself
in quest of health, were the only breaks in three years of
murderous inaction; and at the end of that period Jenkin was
invalided home, having 'lost his health entirely.'
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