ls the call of the
desk, Mr. McFee's brawny shoulder will sit in at the literary feast and
a big handful of scribblers will have to drop down the dumb-waiter shaft
to make room for him. It is a disconcerting figure in Grub Street, the
man who really has something to say.

Publishers are always busy casting horoscopes for their new finds. How
the benign planets must have twirled in happy curves when Harold Bell
Wright was born, if one may credit his familiar mage, Elsbury W.
Reynolds! But the fame that is built merely on publishers' press sheets
does not dig very deep in the iron soil of time. We are all only
raft-builders, as Lord Dunsany tells us in his little parable; even the
raft that Homer made for Helen must break up some day. Who in these
States knows the works of Nat Gould? Twelve million of his dashing
paddock novels have been sold in England, but he is as unknown here as
is Preacher Wright in England. What is so dead as a dead best seller?
Sometimes it is the worst sellers that come to life, roll away the
stone, and an angel is found sitting laughing in the sepulchre. Let me
quote Mr. McFee once more: "I have no taste for blurb, but I cannot
refuse facts."

William M.P. McFee was born at sea in 1881. His father, an English
skipper, was bringing his vessel toward the English coast after a long
voyage. His mother was a native of Nova Scotia. They settled in New
Southgate, a northern middle-class suburb of London, and here McFee was
educated in the city schools of which the first pages of _Casuals of the
Sea_ give a pleasant description. Then he went to a well-known grammar
school at Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk--what we would call over here a
high school. He was a quiet, sturdy boy, and a first-rate cricketer.

At sixteen he was apprenticed to a big engineering firm in Aldersgate.
This is one of the oldest streets in London, near the Charterhouse,
Smithfield Market, and the famous "Bart's" Hospital. In fact, the office
of the firm was built over one of the old plague pits of 1665. His
father had died several years before; and for the boy to become an
apprentice in this well-known firm Mrs. McFee had to pay three hundred
pounds sterling. McFee has often wondered just what he got for the
money. However, the privilege of paying to be better than someone else
is an established way of working out one's destiny in England, and at
the time the mother and son knew no better than to conform. You will
find this problem,