got down to business and did
something interesting either to one or the other. That is why it
won't bear investigation, this record of mine. I am about as
entertaining as one of the crowd coming out of the factory gates
with his full dinner pail. All my adventures have been no more
than keeping that pail moderately full. I've been doing that
since I was twelve, in all sorts of ways. I was an office boy and
a clerk among London's ships, in the last days of the clippers.
And I am forced to recall some of the things--such as bookkeeping
in a jam factory and stoking on a tramp steamer--I can understand
why I and my fellows, without wanting to, drifted about in
indecision till we drifted into war and drifted into peace. And
of course, I've been a journalist. I am still; and so have seen
much of Africa, America, and Europe, without knowing exactly why.
I was in France in 1914--the August, too, of that year, and woke
up from that nightmare in 1917, after the Vimy Ridge attack, when
I returned to England to sit with my wife and children in a
cellar whenever it was a fine night and listened to the guns and
bombs. God, who knows all, might make something of this sort of
inconsequential drift of one day into the next, but I give it up.

But now we pass to the phase of the matter that puzzles us. How
is it that there are some books which can never have abiding life
until they perish and are born again? We have noticed it so
often. There is a book of a certain sort to which this process
seems inevitable. One need only mention Leonard Merrick or Samuel
Butler as examples. The book, we will suppose, has some peculiar
subtlety or flavour of appeal. (We are thinking at the moment of
William McFee's "Letters From an Ocean Tramp.") It is published
and falls dead. Later on--usually about ten years later--it is
taken up with vigour by some other publisher, the stone is rolled
away from the sepulchre, and it begins to move among its destined
lovers.

This remark is caused by our delighted discovery of a previous
book by the author of "Old Junk." "The Sea and the Jungle" is the
title of it, the tale of a voyage on the tramp steamer _Capella_,
from Swansea to Para in the Brazils, and thence 2,000 miles along
the forests of the Amazon and Madeira rivers. It is the kind of
book whose readers will never forget it; the kind of book that
happens to som