he
"Grosvenor."' I said to myself, I'll found a story on a mutiny at sea,
occasioned entirely by the shipment of bad provisions for the crew. No
writer has as yet touched this ugly feature of the life. Dana is silent.
Herman Melville merely drops a joke or two as he rolls out of the
caboose with a cube of salt horse in his hand. It has never been made a
serious canvas of. And yet deeper tragedies lie in the stinking
harness-cask than in the started butt. There are wilder and bloodier
possibilities in a barrel of rotten pork, and in a cask of worm-riddled
ship's bread, than in a whole passage of shifting cargoes, and in a long
round voyage of deadweight that sinks to the wash-streak.

But if I was to find a public I must make my book a romance. I must
import the machinery of the petticoat. The pannikin of rum I proposed to
offer must be palatable enough to tempt the lips of the ladies to sip
it. My publisher would want a market, and if Messrs. Mudie and Smith
would have none of me I should write in vain; for assuredly I was not
going to find a public among sailors. Sailors don't read: a good many of
them _can't_ read. Those who can have little leisure, and they do not
care to fill up their spare hours with yarns of a calling which eighty
out of every hundred of them loathe. So I schemed out a nautical romance
and went to work, and in two months and a week I finished the story of
'The Wreck of the "Grosvenor."'

[Illustration: MRS. CLARK RUSSELL]

Whilst I was writing it an eminent publisher, a gentleman whose
friendship I had been happy in possessing for many years, asked me to
let him have a sea story. I think he had been looking into 'John
Houldsworth: Chief Mate', which some months before this time had been
received with much kindness by the reviewers. I sent him the manuscript
of 'The Wreck of the "Grosvenor."' One of his readers was a lady, and
to this lady my friend the publisher forwarded the manuscript, with a
request for a report on its merits. Now to send the manuscript of a sea
book to a woman! To submit a narrative abounding in marine terms,
thunder-charged with the bully-in-our-alley passions of the forecastle,
throbbing with suppressed oaths, clamorous with rolling oceans, the like
of which no female would ever dream of leaving her bunk to behold--to
submit all this, and how much more, to a lady for an opinion on its
merits! Of course, the poor woman barely understood a third of what she
looked at, and a