a_, August, 1920.

WILLIAM McFEE.

PREFACE[A]

[Footnote A: Preface to the first edition.]

As I sit, this hot July day, by my window on the Walk, while the two
streams, of traffic and of Thames, drift past me, I think of the man
who was my friend, the man who loved this scene so well.

And he is dead. In my hand, as I write, lie his last written words, a
hasty scribble ere the steamer left port on her voyage across the
Atlantic. He is busy, as is evident by the greasy thumb-mark on the
corner. He sat down in the midst of his work to send a last line to
his friend. There is the inevitable joke at the expense of "his friend
the Mate," that individual being in a towering passion with a certain
pig which had escaped from his enclosure. This same pig, he declares,
is some previous First Officer, who had been smitten by Circe for
incontinence, and now wanders even from his sty! But I cannot go on in
this way, for he is dead, poor lad, and I shall not see him again.

To those men who have wedded early I can never hope to explain the
deep-rootedness of such a friendship as ours. It was, to me, as though
my own youth were renewed in more perfect design. Never again shall I
experience that exquisite delight with which one sees a youth reach
post after post along the ways of life and thought, reach out eagerly
to field on field of knowledge, through which one has tramped or
scampered so many years before. With something of wonder, too, was I
inspired to see so young a man lead a life so perfectly balanced, so
exquisitely sensitive to every fine masculine influence. Possessing to
an unusual degree that rare temperament which we call culture, he
entered joyously into all that life offered to him, impatient only of
hypocrisy and what he called "the copiously pious." Many misunderstood
this phase of his character, mistaking for coarseness what was really
a very fine love of honesty in thinking.

Of his antecedents I have often wished to know something, but it was
his whim to treat personal details in a very general way. He would
maintain obstinately that he himself was the most interesting person
he had ever met, because, he would add, he knew so little about
himself! When pressed, he would say, "My forefathers plowed the soil,
my father plowed the ocean, I myself am the full corn in the ear." As
to his childhood, he rarely mentioned it save in a cynical manner,
indicating indisputably enough