where he lived for over a year writing hard. Neither
_Aliens_ nor _Casuals of the Sea_, which he had been at work on for
years, met with the favour of New York publishers. He carried his
manuscripts around the town until weary of that amusement; and when the
United Fruit Company asked him to do some engineering work for them he
was not loath to get back into the old harness. And then came the war.

Alas, it is too much to hope that the Cunard Company will ever officer a
vessel as I have suggested at the outset of these remarks. But I made my
proposal not wholly at random, for in Conrad, Kipling, and McFee, all
three, there is something of the same artistic creed. In those two
magnificent prefaces--to _A Personal Record_ and to _The Nigger of the
Narcissus_--Conrad has set down, in words that should be memorable to
every trafficker in ink, his conception of the duty of the man of
letters. They can never be quoted too often:

"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the
miseries or credulities of mankind.... The sight of human affairs
deserves admiration and pity. And he is not insensible who pays them the
undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile
which is not a grin."

That is the kind of tribute that Mr. McPee has paid to the Gooderich
family in _Casuals of the Sea_. Somewhere in that book he has uttered
the immortal remark that "The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps
cool." I think there is much of himself in that aphorism, and that the
cool enthusiast, the benevolent marbleheart, has many fine things in
store for us.

And there is one other sentence in _Casuals of the Sea_ that lingers
with me, and gives a just trace of the author's mind. It is worth
remembering, and I leave it with you:

"She considered a trouble was a trouble and to be treated as such,
instead of snatching the knotted cord from the hand of God and dealing
murderous blows."

RHUBARB

We used to call him Rhubarb, by reason of his long russet beard, which
we imagined trailing in the prescriptions as he compounded them,
imparting a special potency. He was a little German druggist--_Deutsche
Apotheker_--and his real name was Friedrich Wilhelm Maximilian Schulz.

The village of Kings is tucked away in Long Island, in the Debatable
Land where the generous boundary of New York City zigzags in a sporting
way just to permit horse racing at Belmont Park. It is the most rustic
corner of the