niversity, where in his four years of
undergraduate life he participated eagerly in all forms of social and
literary activity.

In 1895 he joined the reportorial staff of the _Auburn_ (N.Y.)
_Bulletin_, which position he held for two years. Then followed four
years of congenial work on the staff of the _New York Evening Post_,
where he served successively as reporter, copy editor on city desk,
special writer for the city, and, finally, editor of the Saturday
supplement. The editors of the _Post_ were quick to recognize Duncan's
ability in descriptive writing and character delineation, and under the
spur of their encouragement he did his first important literary work, a
series of short-stories of life in the Syrian quarter of New York City,
published first in _The Atlantic Monthly_ and _McClure's Magazine_ and
gathered subsequently into a book entitled _The Soul of the Street_.
About the time of the appearance of this book the author's temperament
reacted against the atmosphere which it embodied, and in the summer of
1900 by an arrangement with _McClure's Magazine_ he went to
Newfoundland to gather impressions and material for a series of
sea-tales. Up to this time he had never spent a night on the ocean nor
been at sea on a sailing vessel; in his boyhood he had rather feared
the great gray ocean, and only later in life did he become so strongly
attracted by its power and mystery and by the impression of its eternal
struggle against those who must wrest a precarious living from its
depths that it provided the background for his most striking and
characteristic stories. Three summers in Newfoundland and one on the
Labrador Coast resulted in _The Way of the Sea_, _Doctor Luke of the
Labrador_, and other books and short-stories, including those of the
present collection.

In 1901 Duncan was appointed assistant to the professor of English at
Washington and Jefferson College, and one year later he was elected
Wallace Professor of Rhetoric at the same institution, a post which he
held until 1906. His duties were comparatively light so that he was
able to devote much of his time to literary work. While occupying this
position he enjoyed the companionship of his brother, Robert Kennedy
Duncan, Professor of Chemistry at the college and later President of
the Mellon Institute of the University of Pittsburgh, and the
prominent author of a well-known series of text books in chemistry,
who died in 1914.

In 1907 and 1908 Norman D