sterman, a writer of
tales of Ulster life, distinguished among other Irish books by their
sincerity and unequalled understanding of the Ulster character. While
other Irish writers of imagination and genius have used Irish life to
express their own temperament, Shan Bullock has devoted his great
literary ability almost entirely to the patient, living and sincere
study of what Ulster really is in itself as a community of men and
women. It is true that his stories are of rural and agricultural
communities, while the scene is now laid chiefly in a great centre of
manufacturing industry. But in Mr. Bullock's studies it is always the
human factor that predominates. One feels while reading one of his tales
that he loves to look upon a man, especially an Ulster man. Here was the
ideal historian of the life of Thomas Andrews.

It fell to me to approach Mr. Bullock. I induced him to go and see the
family, having arranged with them to bring him into touch with the
authorities at the Island Works, who were to show him round and
introduce him to many who knew our friend. He promised me that he would
look over all the material out of which the story could be pieced
together, and that if he found that it "gripped" him and became a labour
of love he would undertake it. The story did, as the reader will see,
grip him, and grip him hard, and in telling it Mr. Bullock has rendered
the greatest of all his services to lovers of truth told about Ireland
by Irish writers.

It will now, I think, be clear why Thomas Andrews has, notwithstanding
his noble end, been represented as the plain, hard-working Ulster boy,
growing into the exemplary and finally the heroic Ulster man that we
knew. We see him ever doing what his hand found to do, and doing it with
his might. Our author, rightly as I think, makes no attempt to present
him as a public man; for this captain of industry in the making was
wholly absorbed in his duties to the great Firm he served. None the less
I am convinced that the public side of the man would not long have
remained undeveloped--who knows but that this very year would have called
him forth?--because he had to my personal knowledge the right public
spirit. Concentration upon the work in hand prevented his active
participation in public affairs, but his mastery over complicated
mechanical problems--his power to use materials--and to organise bodies of
men in their use, would not, I believe, have failed him if he had come
to