's love and
affection for the people whom we also found joy in serving naturally
endeared him to us. He was ever a true knight, entering the lists in
behalf of those principles which make up man's real inner life; and we
realize that his love for men who embody characteristics developed by
constant contact with the sea--fortitude, simplicity, hardiness--died
only with his own passing.

The stories here brought together are woven out of experiences
gathered during his brief periods of contact with our life. But how
real are his characters! Like other famous personalities in
fiction--Mr. Pickwick, Ebenezer Scrooge, Colonel Newcome, Tom Jones,
and a thousand others--who people a world we love, they teach us,
possibly, more of high ideals, and of our capacities for service than
do the actual lives of some saints, or the biographies of
philosophers. And how vivid the action in which his characters take
part! In the external circumstances of his life and in his literary
art and preferences he was singularly like his elder brother in
romance, Robert Louis Stevenson. Both were slight in physique but
manly and vigorous in character and mission in life. Both were
wanderers over the face of the globe. Both loved the sea passionately,
and were at their best in telling of the adventures of those who spend
their lives on the great waters. Both, finally, died at the height of
power, literally with pen in hand, for both left recent and unfinished
work. And the epitaph of either might well be the noble words of
Stevenson from his brave essay on the greatness of the stout heart
bound with triple brass:

"Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his
heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of being,
he passes at a bound on the other side. The noise of the mallet and
chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing,
when, trailing clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded
spirit shoots into the spiritual land."

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

In the blood of Norman Duncan lived a spirit of romance and a love of
adventure which make the chronicle of his short life a record of
change and movement. He was born in Brantford, on the Grand River, in
Western Ontario, July 2, 1871, and though he passed most of the years
of his manhood in the United States, he never took out citizenship
papers in the Republic. After a boyhood spent in various towns in
Canada, he entered Toronto U