best that the market could supply, yet he was
able, from his knowledge of optics and chemistry, to improve them for
his own uses far beyond the ability of the makers. His studio was
filled with examples of his work, and his mind was stocked with
information and opinions on all subjects ranging from international
policies to the servant-girl problem.

He was a man of the world, gentlemanly and successful, about sixty
years old, kindly and gracious of manner, and out of this kindliness
and graciousness had granted me the compliment of his friendship, and
access to his studio whenever I felt like calling upon him.

Yet it never occurred to me that the wonderful and technically correct
marines hanging on his walls were due to anything but the artist's
conscientious study of his subject, and only his casual
mispronounciation of the word "leeward," which landsmen pronounce as
spelled, but which rolls off the tongue of a sailor, be he former dock
rat or naval officer, as "looward," and his giving the long sounds to
the vowels of the words "patent" and "tackle," that induced me to ask
if he had ever been to sea.

"Why, yes," he answered. "Until I was thirty I had no higher ambition
than to become a skipper of some craft; but I never achieved it. The
best I did was to sign first mate for one voyage--and that one was my
last. It was on that voyage that I learned something of the mysterious
properties of light, and it made me a photographer, then an artist. You
are wrong when you say that a searchlight cannot penetrate fog."

"But it has been tried," I remonstrated.

"With ordinary light. Yes, of course, subject to refraction, reflection,
and absorption by the millions of minute globules of water it encounters."

We had been discussing the wreck of the _Titanic_, the most terrible
marine disaster of history, the blunders of construction and
management, and the later proposed improvements as to the lowering of
boats and the location of ice in a fog.

Among these considerations was also the plan of carrying a powerful
searchlight whose beam would illumine the path of a twenty-knot liner
and render objects visible in time to avoid them. In regard to this I
had contended that a searchlight could not penetrate fog, and if it
could, would do as much harm as good by blinding and confusing the
watch officers and lookouts on other craft.

"But what other kind of light can be used?" I asked, in answer to his
mention of ordinary li