uncan was special correspondent for _Harper's
Magazine_ in Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt, and in 1912 and 1913 he was
sent by the same magazine to Australia, New Guinea, the Dutch East
Indies, and the Malay States. Between these travel periods he acted
for two years as adjunct professor of English at the University of
Kansas. Not any of Duncan's foreign travel seems to have impressed him
as did his visits to Newfoundland and the Labrador coast, and some of
his best tales are those of the Northland--powerful stories of life
reduced to its elements. Of these tales those of the present
collection are a good representation.

The creator of these great stories was cut off at the height of his
power; he died very suddenly of heart-disease while playing a
golf-match in Fredonia, New York, on October 18, 1916. He lies buried
in Brantford, Ontario, the town of his birth.

Few modern writers of tales and short-stories have drawn their
materials from sources as scattered as those which attracted Norman
Duncan. Among the immigrants of the East Side of New York, the rough
lumber-jacks of the Northwest, and the trappers and deep-sea fishermen
of Newfoundland and The Labrador he gathered his ideas and
impressions. But though his characters and incidents are chosen from
such diverse sources, the characteristics of his literary art remain
constant in all his books, for the personality of the author did not
change.

Norman Duncan was a realist in that he copied life. But his realism is
that of Dickens and Bret Harte and Kipling rather than that of Mrs.
Freeman and Arthur Morrison and the Russian story-tellers. He cared
less for the accuracy of details than for the vividness of his general
impressions and the force of his moral lessons. Like Bret Harte he
idealized life. Like Harte, too, he was fond of dramatic situations
and striking contrasts, of mixing the bitter and the sweet and the
rough and the smooth of life; his introduction of the innocent baby
into the drunkard-filled bar-room in _The Measure of a Man_ is
strikingly like Bret Harte's similar employment of this sentimental
device in _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, and the presence of Patty Batch
among the soiled women of Swamp's End in the same tale and of the
tawdry Millie Slade face to face with the curate in _The Mother_ is
again reminiscent of Harte's technique. Like Dickens and like Bret
Harte, Duncan was a frank moralist. His chief concern was in winnowing
the souls of men