For all this seemed remarkably remote from my introductory remark about Marco Polo. I had in mind, then, not _The Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian_, but the small novel called _Messer Marco Polo_ which Donn Byrne published now some years ago. And it is of this fiction that I wish here to speak more specifically, because of my personal involvement in its fortunes. § 18 Not often does one sustain the sense of having long awaited the book which time and chance and a kindred desire in another's being have combined to produce at last, and to make at last a vended commodity, as easy now to come by as blotting-paper or bad whiskey. I had this sense about _Messer Marco Polo_. It was, to me, the most delightful of surprises, a bit of unanticipatable flotsam washed up from the wide sunless sea of "realism." For we were, at just that time, being edified rather remorselessly. Sinclair Lewis had, via the book to which I have but now referred, detected several flaws in the cultural life of the Middle West; John Dos Passos had discovered that the Wilson War had been conducted not altogether as a pleasure trip for the private soldier; and Upton Sinclair was in his customary low spirits. Nobody, I think, could have looked for the coming of a _Messer Marco Polo_ through the auctorial welter,--whose susurrus was after all but a more literate, vast "Ain't it awful, Mabel?"--among those fretful waves of indignation over the dreariness of small-town life and the loneliness of the artist in this unappreciative country, and over how terribly our army swore in Flanders, and over the venality of our press and pulpit and every other institution, and (lone lisper of good yet to come) over the imminence of several more stupendous wars that would wipe out us and all our sordid existence. And yet, through these gray floods of portentous information (here neatly to round off my simile) floated this carved spar of loveliness, with absolutely startling irrelevance. That _Messer Marco Polo_ should have "happened" at this precise moment seemed a small miracle so pleasure-giving that I hastily waived all consideration as to the book's ultimate value. I only knew I had joyed in the reading of it, somewhat as the partially starved might rejoice in an unexpected windfall of savory food, without any need to deliberate the viands' durability.