een is being fought. Yet here, as my eyes
wander over the great ocean around me, nothing but absolute peace
meets my view. But it too has its stormy times and its days when its
strength and its mighty depths of possibilities are the most insistent
points about it. And this spirit of the deep Norman Duncan seems to
have understood as did no other of our visitors.

Our experience of the men from the hubs of existence had led us to
regard them all as hardened by a keener struggle than ours, and
critical, if not suspicious, of those who were satisfied to endure
greater physical toil and discomfort than they for so much smaller
material return. In the Labrador even a dog hates to be laughed at,
and the merest suspicion of the supercilious makes a gap which it is
almost impossible to bridge. But Norman Duncan created no such gap. He
was, therefore, an anomaly to us--he was away below the surface--and
few of us, during the few weeks he stayed, got to know him well enough
to appreciate his real worth. Yet men who "go down to the sea in
ships" have before now been known to sleep through a Grand Opera, or
to see little to attract in the works of the Old Masters. And so we
gather comfort for our inability to measure this man at his full
stature.

All who love men of tender, responsive imagination loved Duncan. It
was quite characteristic of the man that though he earned large sums
of money by his pen, he was always so generous in helping those in
need--more especially those who showed talents to which they were
unable, through stress of circumstances, to give expression--that he
died practically a poor man. He was a high-souled, generous idealist.
All his work is purposeful, conveying to his readers a moral lesson.
He had the keenest appreciation of the feelings of others and
understood the immense significance of the little things of life--a
fact evidenced by his vivid descriptions of the beauties of Nature,
which he first appreciated and then, with his mastery of English, so
ably described. His own experience of poverty and struggle after
leaving the university opened to him channels for his sympathetic
portrayal of humble life. Physically he was never a fighter or an
athlete; but he proved himself possessed of singular personal courage.
He fought his best fights, however, on fields to which gladiators have
no entry and in battles which, unlike our physical contests, are not
spasmodic, but increasing and eternal. Norman Duncan