Well, he knows, by instinct I imagine, that I care nothing for music, as music. So when I ask for hymn-tunes, he smiles soberly and complies. I hear my favourites to my heart's content--"Hark, Hark, My Soul," "Weary of Earth," "Abide With Me," and "Thou Knowest, Lord." How glad they must be who believe these words! The red sun was flooding the room with his last flaming signal as the man played: "_Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide, When other helpers fail, and comforts flee, Help of the helpless, O abide with me!_" Yes, _mon ami_, all men know of that tremendous loss inherent in all their labours. And it is, I think, to balance that loss that they have invented religion. XXII It has suddenly struck me that there are many important things to be found by considering the cheap literature which floods the English and American publics week by week and month by month. I am afraid that, when at home in Chelsea, where even the idlers read Swinburne and Lord de Tabley, I had grown accustomed to the stilted point of view, calling novelettes "trashy" and beneath an intellectual man's consideration. Well, since this particular trash forms the staple brain food in the Mercantile Marine, I must needs look into it more closely. With results. There is a question of bulk and output. This is appalling to a laborious writer, a student or a thinker. Week by week there pours forth an unending deluge of love fiction, and week by week this deluge is absorbed into the systems of millions of human beings. We speak glibly of the world-wide fame of some classic, when, in point of fact, the people familiar with that classic are isolated specks in the vast, solid mass to whom some novelettist is a household god. The classic will have, say, one votary in the family, the novelettist will capture the family _en bloc_. An engineer will receive a cargo of novelettes, all of which have been digested, or even feverishly devoured, by his mother, wife, or sisters. He will pass them on to the Steward, who will read them and give them to the sailors and firemen. And this obtains in every ship wherever the English language is spoken. What classic can claim a public that does not seem microscopic compared to this? I cannot but observe, too, that Miss Anonyme often writes exceedingly well. No extraneous vapourings are admitted, and the plot is steadily developed to its inevitable conclusion of "happy ever after." The metaphors are somewhat stereotyped, and quotations from Tennyson are awkwardly handled, but--what would you for a penny? Johnson's explanation--that they write well in order to be paid well--is correct. Miss Anonyme knows her "market," and she writes for it as well as can be expected under the circumstances.