He has always been deeply interested in painting, and no gallery in any port he visited ever escaped him. These extracts from some of his letters will show whether his avocations were those of most engineers:

As I crossed the swing-bridge of the docks at Garston (Liverpool) the other day, and saw the tapering spars silhouetted against the pale sky, and the zinc-coloured river with its vague Cheshire shores dissolving in mist, it occurred to me that if an indulgent genie were to appear and make me an offer I would cheerfully give up writing for painting. As it is, I see things in pictures and I spend more time in the Walker Gallery than in the library next door.

I've got about all I can get out of books, and now I don't relish them save as memories. The reason for my wish, I suppose, is that character, not incident, is my metier. And you can draw character, paint character, but you can't very well blat about it, can you?

I am afraid Balzac's job is too big for anybody nowadays. The worst of writing men nowadays is their horrible ignorance of how people live, of ordinary human possibilities.

A- is always pitching into me for my insane ideas about "cheap stuff." He says I'm on the wrong tack and I'll be a failure if I don't do what the public wants. I said I didn't, care a blue curse what the public wanted, nor did I worry much if I never made a big name. All I want is to do some fine and honourable work, to do it as well as I possibly could, and there my responsibility ended. To hell with

writing, I want to feel and see!

I am laying in a gallon of ink and a couple of cwt. of paper, to the amusement of the others, who imagine I am a mer

chant of some sort who has to transact business at sea because Scotland yard are after him!

His kit for every voyage, besides the gallon of ink and the hundredweight of foolscap, always included a score of books, ranging from Livy or Chaucer to Gorky and histories of Italian art. Happening to be in New York at the time of the first exhibition in this country of "futurist" pictures, he entered eagerly into the current discussion in the newspaper correspondence columns. He wrote for a leading London journal an article on "The Conditions of Labour at Sea." He finds time to contribute to the Atlantic Monthly pieces of styptic prose that make zigzags on the sphygmograph of the editor. His letters written weekly to the artist friend he once lived with in Chelsea show a humorous and ironical mind ranging over all topics that concern cultivated men. I fancy he could out-argue many a university professor on Russian fiction, or Michelangelo, or steam turbines.

When one says that McFee found little intellectually in common with his engineering colleagues, that is not to say that he was a prig. He was interested in everything that they were, but in a great deal more, too. And after obtaining his extra chief's certificate from the London

Board of Trade, with a grade of ninety-eight per cent., he was not inclined to rest on his gauges.

In 1912 he took a walking trip from Glasgow to London, to gather local colour for a book he had long meditated; then he took ship for the United States, 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. McFee 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."

W

RHUBARB

E 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 City. To most New Yorkers it is as remote as Helgoland and as little known. It has no movie theatre, no news-stand, no cigar store, no village atheist. The railroad station, where one hundred and fifty trains a day do not stop, might well be mistaken for a Buddhist shrine, so steeped in discreet melancholy is it. The Fire Department consists of an old hose wagon first used to extinguish fires kindled by the Republicans when Rutherford B. Hayes was elected. In the weather-beaten Kings Lyceum "East Lynne" is still per