and the whole matter of gentility, cuttingly set out
in _Aliens_.

After three years as an apprentice, McFee was sent out by the firm on
various important engineering jobs, notably a pumping installation at
Tring, which he celebrated in a pamphlet of very creditable juvenile
verses, for which he borrowed Mr. Kipling's mantle. This was at the time
of the Boer War, when everybody in trousers who wrote verses was either
imitating Kipling or reacting from him.

His engineering work gave young McFee a powerful interest in the lives
and thoughts of the working classes. He was strongly influenced by
socialism, and all his spare moments were spent with books. He came to
live in Chelsea with an artist friend, but he had already tasted life at
first hand, and the rather hazy atmosphere of that literary and artistic
Utopia made him uneasy. His afternoons were spent at the British Museum
reading room, his evenings at the Northampton Institute, where he
attended classes, and even did a little lecturing of his own. Competent
engineer as he was, that was never sufficient to occupy his mind. As
early as 1902 he was writing short stories and trying to sell them.

In 1905 his uncle, a shipmaster, offered him a berth in the engine room
of one of his steamers, bound for Trieste. He jumped at the chance.
Since then he has been at sea almost continuously, save for one year
(1912-13) when he settled down in Nutley, New Jersey, to write. The
reader of _Aliens_ will be pretty familiar with Nutley by the time he
reaches page 416. "Netley" is but a thin disguise. I suspect a certain
liveliness in the ozone of Nutley. Did not Frank Stockton write some of
his best tales there? Some day some literary meteorologist will explain
how these intellectual anticyclones originate in such places as Nutley
(N.J.), Galesburg (Ill.), Port Washington (N.Y.), and Bryn Mawr (Pa.)

The life of a merchantman engineer would not seem, to open a fair
prospect into literature. The work is gruelling and at the same time
monotonous. Constant change of scene and absence of home ties are (I
speak subject to correction) demoralizing; after the coveted chief's
certificate is won, ambition has little further to look forward to. A
small and stuffy cabin in the belly of the ship is not an inviting
study. The works of Miss Corelli and Messrs. Haig and Haig are the only
diversions of most of the profession. Art, literature, and politics do
not interest them. Picture postcards,