e as nobly
and simply as Belloc on Sussex, with his sweet broken music:

I never get between the pines
But I smell the Sussex air;
Nor I never come on a belt of sand
But my home is there.
And along the sky the line of the Downs
So noble and so bare.

A lost thing could I never find,
Nor a broken thing mend:
And I fear I shall be all alone
When I get towards the end.
Who will there be to comfort me
Or who will be my friend?

I will gather and carefully make my friends
Of the men of the Sussex Weald,
They watch the stars from silent folds,
They stiffly plough the field.
By them and the God of the South Country
My poor soul shall be healed.

If I ever become a rich man,
Or if ever I grow to be old,
I will build a house with deep thatch
To shelter me from the cold,
And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
And the story of Sussex told.

I will hold my house in the high wood
Within a walk of the sea,
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
Shall sit and drink with me.

A CASUAL OF THE SEA

He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.

--GEORGE HERBERT.

Books sometimes make surprising connections with life. Fifteen-year-old
Tommy Jonkers, shipping as O.S. (ordinary seaman) on the S.S.
_Fernfield_ in Glasgow in 1911, could hardly have suspected that the
second engineer would write a novel and put him in it; or that that same
novel would one day lift him out of focsle and galley and set him
working for a publishing house on far-away Long Island. Is it not one
more proof of the surprising power of the written word?

For Tommy is not one of those who expect to find their names in print.
The mere sight of his name on a newspaper page, in an article I wrote
about him, brought (so he naively told me) tears to his eyes. Excellent,
simple-hearted Tommy! How little did you think, when you signed on to
help the _Fernfield_ carry coal from Glasgow to Alexandria, that the
long arm of the Miehle press was already waiting for you; that thousands
of good people reading a certain novel would be familiar with your
"round rosy face and clear sea-blue eyes."

"Tommy" (whose real name is Drevis) was born in Amsterdam in 1896. His
father was a fireman at sea, and contributed next to nothing to the
support of Tommy and his pretty little sister Greta. They lived with