ugh he was by no means
drunk. "I'm proud and delighted beyond measure to meet ye," he began. "I
hope ye'll do me the honour to shake hands with me." He went through
the ceremony with great apparent enthusiasm, and I had, indeed, some
difficulty in recovering my hand from him. "I'm a ship's engineer,"
he went on, "and I can tell ye, sir, that for years past ye've been my
treasured companion; through mony and mony a lonely nicht on the rolling
ocean yer books hev been my treasured friends, and mony and mony's the
time I've laffed and cried over ye. Mon, but I'm pleased and proud
to meet ye--pleased and proud." I expressed my gratification at this
statement as well as I could and he said, suiting the action to the
word: "Ye'll not mind my ringing for a glass of whisky? I shall esteem
it an honour to take a glass with ye and to be able to boast hereafter
that ye once stood a drink to me." He got his drink and absorbed
it gravely, with a wish that I might enjoy long life, health and
prosperity. Now there was never a man who was better pleased than I
am to learn that he has given pleasure to another by his work. I dare
imitate the candour of Oliver Wendell Holmes and confess that I am fond
of sweetmeats, but one can have too much even of sugar-plums, and I was
getting a little weary of my friend's ecstatics when he began to change
his tone. "Perhaps," he said, "ye won't think me impertinent if I say
that your work is sometimes curiously unequal. Ye've written a lot in
yer time that's very far from being worthy of ye. D'ye know that, now
I begin to think of it, I'm inclined to fancy that ye're aboot the most
unequal workman I've ever made myself familiarly acquainted with." He
maundered along on this theme for two or three minutes and at last
he clinched the nail. "A lot of what ye've done," he told me, "is the
merest piffle, and if ye were to ask me for a candid judgment, I should
say that ye've never written but one work which has really expressed
your genius. I can't mind the name of it just at the moment, but there's
nae doot at all about it; there's real power in it, there's plot,
there's construction, there's style, there's knowledge of character.
Mon! it's a great book; I'll mind the name of it in a minute. Ay! I've
got it--it's the only thing ye ever wrote that maks ye worth your salt
as a literairy mon and the title of it is _Lady Audleys Secret!_"

Now no man, neither Mr Kipling nor any other, could possibly have
evo