THE MARKET _By_ WILLIAM MCFEE William McFee's name is associated with the sea, but in his writing he treats the life of ships and sailors more as a background than as the essential substance of his tale. I have chosen this brief and colorful little sketch to represent his talent because it is different from the work with which most of his readers are familiar, and because it represents a mood very characteristic of him--an imaginative and observant treatment of the workings of commerce. His interest in fruit is intimate, as he has been for some years an engineer in the sea service of the United Fruit Company, with a Mediterranean interim--reflected in much of his recent writing--during the War. The publication of McFee's _Casuals of the Sea_ in 1916 was something of an event in the world of books, and introduced to the reading world a new writer of unquestionable strength and subtlety. His earlier books, _An Ocean Tramp_ and _Aliens_ (both republished since), had gone almost unnoticed--which, it is safe to say, will not happen again to anything he cares to publish. His later books are _Captain Macedoine's Daughter_, _Harbours of Memory_, and _An Engineer's Notebook_. He was born at sea in 1881, the son of a sea-captain; grew up in a northern suburb of London, served his apprenticeship in a big engineering shop, and has been in ships most of the time since 1905. There is a sharp, imperative rap on my outer door; a rap having within its insistent urgency a shadow of delicate diffidence, as though the person responsible were a trifle scared of the performance and on tiptoe to run away. I roll over and regard the clock. Four-forty. One of the dubious by-products of continuous service as a senior assistant at sea is the habit of waking automatically about 4 A. M. This gives one several hours, when ashore, to meditate upon one's sins, frailties, and (more rarely) triumphs and virtues. For a man who gets up at say four-thirty is regarded with aversion ashore. His family express themselves with superfluous vigor. He must lie still and meditate, or suffer the ignominy of being asked when he is going away again.