who has to transact business at sea because Scotland yard are alter
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