A genuinely humorous woman is the German skipper's wife in Falk, and the niece, the heroine who turns the head of the former cannibal of Falk--this an echo, doubtless, from the anecdote of the dog-eating granduncle B---- of the Reminiscences--is heroic in her way. Funniest of all is the captain himself. Falk is almost a tragic figure. Amy Foster--in the same volume--is pathetic, and Bessie Carvil, of To-morrow, might have been signed by Hardy. In Youth the old sea-dog's motherly wife is the only woman. As for the impure witch in The Heart of Darkness, I can only say that she creates a new shudder. How she appeals to the imagination! The soft-spoken lady, bereft of her hero in this narrative, who lives in Brussels, is a specimen of Conrad's ability to make reverberate in our memory an enchanting personality, and with a few strokes of the brush. We cannot admire the daughter of poor old Captain Whalley in The End of Tether, but she is the propulsive force of his actions and final tragedy. For her we have "that form of contempt which is called pity." That particular story will rank with the best in the world's literature. Nina Almayer shows the atavistic "pull" of the soil and opposes finesse to force, while Alice Jacobus in 'Twixt Land and Sea (A Smile of Fortune) is half-way on the road back to barbarism. But Nina will be happy with her chief. In depicting the slow decadence of character in mixed races and the naive stammerings at the birth of their souls, Conrad is unapproachable.