"He did what he could," Marlow retorted gently, "and on his own showing that was not a very great deal. I cannot help thinking that there was some malice in the way he seized the opportunity to serve you. He managed to make you uncomfortable. You wanted to go to sea, but he jumped on the chance of accommodating your desire with a vengeance. I am inclined to think your cheek alarmed him. And this was an excellent occasion to suppress you altogether. For if you accepted he was relieved of you with every appearance of humanity, and if you made objections (after requesting his assistance, mind you) it was open to him to drop you as a sort of impostor. You might have had to decline that berth for some very valid reason. From sheer necessity, perhaps. The notice was too uncommonly short. But under the circumstances you'd have covered yourself with ignominy." Our new friend knocked the ashes out of his pipe. There is something about Conrad which gives a warm feeling about the heart. A certain fineness of humor, a certain fullness of sympathy. He never mixes his similes; they always take the same tone and the same color. For instance: I took a piece of cake and went out to bribe the Fyne dog into some sort of self-control. His sharp, comical yapping was unbearable, like stabs through one's brain, and Fyne's deeply modulated remonstrances abashed the vivacious animal no more than the deep, patient murmur of the sea abashes a nigger minstrel on a popular beach. Fyne was beginning to swear at him in low, sepulchral tones when I appeared. The dog became at once wildly demonstrative, half-strangling himself in his collar, his eyes and tongue hanging out in the excess of his uncomprehensible affection for me. This was before he caught sight of the cake in my hand. A series of vertical springs high up in the air followed, and then, when he got the cake, he instantly lost his interest in everything else. No, this illustration is not of Conrad's finest, but in a homely way it illustrates a deep sympathy with life, which this strong worker and writer gives in such bountiful measure in all his literature; and, to quote an eminent writer, "Literature and Conrad are interchangeable terms." --Henry Blackman Sell. AN AMERICAN NOVEL _Clark's Field_, by Robert Herrick. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]