d overboard--professionally, McPhee does not
approve of saving life at sea, and he has often told me that a new Hell
awaits stokers and trimmers who sign for a strong man's pay and fall
sick the second day out. He believes in throwing boots at fourth and
fifth engineers when they wake him up at night with word that a bearing
is redhot, all because a lamp's glare is reflected red from the twirling
metal. He believes that there are only two poets in the world; one being
Robert Burns, of course, and the other Gerald Massey. When he has
time for novels he reads Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade chiefly the
latter--and knows whole pages of "Very Hard Cash" by heart. In the
saloon his table is next to the captain's, and he drinks only water
while his engines work.

He was good to me when we first met, because I did not ask questions,
and believed in Charles Reade as a most shamefully neglected author.
Later he approved of my writings to the extent of one pamphlet of
twenty-four pages that I wrote for Holdock, Steiner & Chase, owners of
the line, when they bought some ventilating patent and fitted it to the
cabins of the Breslau, Spandau, and Koltzau. The purser of the Breslau
recommended me to Holdock's secretary for the job; and Holdock, who is a
Wesleyan Methodist, invited me to his house, and gave me dinner with
the governess when the others had finished, and placed the plans and
specifications in my hand, and I wrote the pamphlet that same afternoon.
It was called "Comfort in the Cabin," and brought me seven pound ten,
cash down--an important sum of money in those days; and the governess,
who was teaching Master John Holdock his scales, told me that Mrs.
Holdock had told her to keep an eye on me, in case I went away with
coats from the hat-rack. McPhee liked that pamphlet enormously, for it
was composed in the Bouverie-Byzantine style, with baroque and rococo
embellishments; and afterwards he introduced me to Mrs. McPhee, who
succeeded Dinah in my heart; for Dinah was half a world away, and it
is wholesome and antiseptic to love such a woman as Janet McPhee. They
lived in a little twelve-pound house, close to the shipping. When McPhee
was away Mrs. McPhee read the Lloyds column in the papers, and called on
the wives of senior engineers of equal social standing. Once or twice,
too, Mrs. Holdock visited Mrs. McPhee in a brougham with celluloid
fittings, and I have reason to believe that, after she had played
owner's wife lon