now that the professional
reader has a jaundiced eye; insensibly he acquires a parallax which
distorts his vision. Reading incessantly, now fiction, now history,
poetry, essays, philosophy, science, exegetics, and what not, he becomes
a kind of pantechnicon of slovenly knowledge; a knower of thousands of
things that aren't so. Every crank's whim, every cretin's philosophy, is
fired at him first of all. Every six months comes in the inevitable
treatise on the fourth dimension or on making gold from sea-water, or on
using moonlight to run dynamos, or on Pope Joan or Prester John. And
with it all he must retain his simple-hearted faith in the great art of
writing and in the beneficence of Gutenberg.

Manuscript readers need a trade union far worse than authors. There is
all too little clannishness among us. We who are the helpless target for
the slings and arrows of every writer who chooses to put pen on
foolscap--might we not meet now and then for the humour of exchanging
anecdotes? No class of beings is more in need of the consolations of
intercourse. Perpend, brothers! Let us order a tierce of malmsey and
talk it over! Perchance, too, a trade union among readers might be of
substantial advantage. Is it not sad that a man should read manuscripts
all the sweet years of his maturity, and be paid forty dollars a week?
Let us make sixty the minimum--or let there be a pogrom among the
authors!

WILLIAM McFEE

M'Phee is the most tidy of chief engineers. If the leg of a
cockroach gets into one of his slide-valves the whole ship knows it,
and half the ship has to clean up the mess.

--RUDYARD KIPLING.

The next time the Cunard Company commissions a new liner I wish they
would sign on Joseph Conrad as captain, Rudyard Kipling as purser, and
William McFee as chief engineer. They might add Don Marquis as deck
steward and Hall Caine as chief-stewardess. Then I would like to be at
Raymond and Whitcomb's and watch the clerks booking passages!

William McFee does not spell his name quite as does the Scotch engineer
in Mr. Kipling's _Brugglesmith_, but I feel sure that his attitude
toward cockroaches in the slide-valve is the same. Unhappily I do not
know Mr. McFee in his capacity as engineer; but I know and respect his
feelings as a writer, his love of honourable and honest work, his
disdain for blurb and blat. And by an author's attitude toward the
purveyors of publicity, you may know him.

One evening