have fallen on everyone, and it was obvious that everyone in the ship was deeply affected. Their own friends, men with whom they had been chaffing five minutes before, had been literally blotted out of existence in an instant; at least, it appeared at the moment impossible for anyone to be alive.

Then the men recovered themselves, and there was a rush to get the clumsy boat out. The Sir Thomas Dancer steered over towards the scene of the disaster, and almost at once there were shouts from the lookout that there were several men in the water, and one of them anyhow seemed to be alive.

The boat was got out in marvelously quick time, and the man was rescued from the icy-cold water and laid in the bottom of the boat, and a rapid search was made among the floating wreckage for others. Two more mangled corpses were picked up, but the remaining eleven men had all gone down with their ship.

The mine had done its work most thoroughly, and with the exception of the one man, who it turned out had been standing right in the bows of the ship, every soul was killed.

The warmth of the Sir Thomas Dancer's cabin, a stiff tot of brandy, and a change of clothes worked marvels, and three days later the man had returned to duty apparently none the

worse.

'What a ghastly thing,' said Jones to Stephens, who was standing near him in the wheel-house; 'I would have sooner it had happened to almost anyone else than that skipper,' he was such a particularly nice man, and it was so funny that he should have the same name as his ship.'

'Why, sir, she was his own ship which he had built for him before the war, and he used to fish in her regular, and seven of the crew were relations of his,' said Stephens. 'He was one of the

best-known men, and one of the best fishermen out of Shields.'

'I never knew that,' said Jones, 'and I must say I wish now that I had n't strafed that signalman yesterday. Poor chap, he said he was doing his best, and certainly he could not have done more than he has now. Well, I suppose we must get to work again, and we shall have to sweep with the Sparrow now.'

The six trawlers retraced their steps for several miles and then re-formed line and sweeping was continued, but except for one more explosion in the sweep of the second pair nothing more was found that day.

About 4 o'clock in the evening the lookout reported an object in sight about five miles ahead, which he thought was not unlike a submarine. It was a perfectly calm evening, and there was a great deal of mirage about.

The most extraordinary effects are produced by this mirage or refraction on the horizon. Sometimes a ship will appear upside down, and sometimes the real and the inverted images will both be visible, one above the other. A buoy will sometimes look like a factory chimney, and sometimes like a low flat island.

No one seriously thought it was in the least likely that it was really a submarine; these elusive craft are not fond of trawlers, and are not in the habit of waiting considerately on the surface till trawlers approach them.

When the object in question was close enough to be distinguished, she turned out to be a portion of a small sailing schooner with the main lowermast standing. She had evidently struck a mine and had been completely cut in half, the stern of the ship being practically undamaged. A boat was dispatched to examine her, but there were no men on board, though it subsequently transpired that three of the men who had been asleep in the cabin

had been unhurt and had escaped in a dinghy which was hanging over the

stern.

'That is satisfactory,' said Jones, 'that accounts for the explosion we heard last night; I was afraid it might have been a big cargo vessel.'

At eight o'clock that night the thirteen trawlers rendezvoused to compare notes and arrange the next day's sweeping. Before dropping anchor the melancholy task of burying the two men who had been picked up from the John Brown was carried out. The bodies had been carefully prepared for burial, the trawlers all stopped close together and the white ensigns were all lowered to half mast.

The touching words of the burial servvice were read by Jones, and at the conclusion of the appointed prayers in the Prayer Book he turned to the prayer for those at sea and read the words which might have been specially written for men engaged in the work on which they were employed - 'that we may be a security for such as pass on the seas upon their lawful occasions, . . . and that we may return in safety. to enjoy the blessings of the land with the fruits of our labors.'

The trawlers then anchored in a small bay for the night, and the work of plotting the mines destroyed on the chart and arranging for the next day's labors was undertaken.

It was after eleven before any of the officers were in bed, and the ships weighed again at 3.30 A.M., as it was imperative that no time should be wasted in clearing the channel. Shipping was being held up at both ends, and even in 1916 shipping was too valuable to be allowed to waste an hour more than could be helped.

One more trawler joined up at daylight, and the fourteen recommenced their work in exactly a similar manner

Blackwood's Magazine

as they had done the previous day and continued it till dark.

It was three days later, and the captain's clerk in the senior officers' ship had just settled down to his afternoon sleep (or 'cork' as he called it). Not that he was in the habit of sleeping regularly during the afternoons, but he had been up a large part of the night coding messages, and the afternoon was hot, and the mosquitoes were unusually active on the upper deck.

He was awakened about 2.30 by the messenger from the wireless room, who handed him a coded message. It must be left entirely to the reader's imagination to guess what that clerk said, but he did say it all, and his earlier education in a gun-room had not been wasted.

Still, in spite of what he said and thought, he hurried off to interpret the signal.

It read as follows: 'Sir Thomas Dancer to H.M.S. Batchy. Channel now clear for traffic to proceed. Twenty-six mines destroyed.'

Five minutes later the masts of the cruiser were decked with flags instructing the fleet of merchant ships to proceed, and the motor boat with the boarding officer was flitting about among them, urging them to hurry up and get away.

Before dark that night over one hundred merchant vessels, loaded with every sort and kind of war material, had weighed and were proceeding down the swept channel. Everyone of them. arrived at their destination safely.

About midnight that same night fourteen weary trawlers felt their way into the anchorage, and almost before the anchors were on the bottom the whole of the crews were fast asleep, absolutely worn out with the strain of five days' perpetual sweeping in a mine-field.

A ROMANTIC, incurably, defiantly. That would have been the critic's first impressions of Booth Tarkington. I believe a great many critics, having received that impression from reading Monsieur Beaucaire and A Gentleman from Indiana, stoutly stuck to their opinions, read no more of Mr. Tarkington, and call him still a romantic. Yet even in the first two books there were signs: I remember, years ago, finding Monsieur Beaucaire in the Idler, during that brief period when Mr. Sime edited that chameleon magazine, and devouring it eagerly. It is an immoderately competent essay in costume. It has n't a flaw. You know its surface as you know the surface of a statue by Canova. There are no surprises even the surprise of the Duc's discovery is as certain as sunrise. Lewis Waller added nothing to its direct, theatrical appeal. It is a great achievement in a small way. Beside it such an effort as The Passionate Elopement seems overdone

a whole shopful of scholarly curiosities beside one perfect piece. Yet, in spite of its false, triumphant unity it did, I swear, betray personality. For one thing there was an interest in clothes, which still obsess Mr. Tarkington. And although the tale was romantic, I suspected a capacity for satire, and I was positive that sentiment was more deep rooted in Mr. Tarkington than was romance. And in all his books since he has been proving that I was right.

The difference between romance and

sentiment is easy to see, but not so easy to state. Romance is an attitude to facts, sentiment is a window through which a man sees truth. The romantic may refuse to admit facts he will, for instance, go on calling war glorious; the sentimentalist will transfigure his facts. Or, take instances: Barrie, Shaw, Goldsmith, Sterne, Euripides are sentimentalists; Mr. Locke, Rider Haggard, Dumas, Scott are romantics. I doubt if there was ever a Latin Dumas of course was negro who was really a romantic; but the greatest sentimentalists, as the great cynics and the great pessimists, have all been Latin. To be a great romantic author, as was Scott, you color your material; a great sentimentalist cares nothing about the material. He can turn anything into matter of sentiment. You can see how true this is by choosing something ludicrous—a romantic author can do nothing with toothache; a great sentimentalist might make a masterpiece out of it. Did not Barrie go even lower and score a huge success?

There were traces, as I say, of his essential quality in Mr. Tarkington's early books; but the reader will find those traces clearly manifested in the book of short stories In the Arena. Mr. Tarkington was rash enough to indulge in a political career-something which, in the U.S.A., is to our politics as their football is to ours and he evidently tried to get even with the Indiana legislature by his stories. As short stories they are neither particularly good, nor particularly bad. They are nowhere near Mr. Tarking

ton's later work in craftsmanship or feeling; but the book stamps him definitely as sentimentalist - the greatest, perhaps, in English fiction since Thackeray; and with as little leanings to romance as had the author of Rebecca and Rowena. The likeness to Thackeray's early work is very evident in what is, perhaps, the most noteworthy of these stories Mrs. Protheroe. In it Mr. Tarkington gives a new version of the old siren incident his Odysseus a senator from the country his siren a fascinating lobbyist for a Bill which, if passed, will increase the value of her property. The thing is crude, rather staccato, and invested with a deliberate contrast of boorishness and grace a contrast which once again reminds us how important to Mr. Tarkington are clothes, manner, the gesture. He does not, as Thackeray, give his readers the author's comments on the situation; but he has his own method of underlining, less direct but no less emphatic than Thackeray's.

His next book is almost written in italics. Mr. Tarkington himself now despises The Conquest of Canaan, which appeared in 1905 and immediately seized on success. To me it seems a far from despicable story. It has, as has a great deal of the work of the greatest imaginative artists, a strong flavor of the fairy story. That is as it should be. He was in the middle thirties in 1905 he was born the same year as Mr. Kipling

and to Mr. Tarkington, a man of slowly developing temperament, the middle thirties were evidently exuberant youth. Youth will believe either in black hell or in fairies. The desire for the magic carpet, the passion for the good all-conquering sword, the love for the fairy prince and his-alas! generally blonde princess, are proper to youth. In The Conquest of Canaan, Mr. Tarkington gave us the younger son kind of story: it is full of generous hope

and pleasant make-believe, and the transforming kindness which really does occur in this world far more frequently than the pessimists admit. There are grave flaws in the tale: that is one reason why it seems more promising than Monsieur Beaucaire. The villainous Judge Pike, who defends the fairy princess and defames the prince, is a trifle too ogreish. And then he should not be forgiven. Ogres are made for decapitation or transfixion. Towards the end of his story Mr. Tarkington passes from the legitimate fairy story to the modern pantomime there is that arranging sound behind the scenes which heralds the transformation scene, and the reader is suddenly over-aware of the footlights. Still it is, in its youthful way, a charming book. And it is the first novel in which Mr. Tarkington's humor gets anything like enough scope. The chorus of old men in the club who do nothing but discuss and gossip and quarrel, is in the big style; and big, too, in a simple way, is Joe Louden himself - the ugly duckling, black sheep of a fairy prince, if I may be allowed to mix my nursery metaphors. Ariel Tabor, however, the princess, is less successful. She has only relative qualities, as is the case with a great many of Mr. Tarkington's women. It is difficult to see her apart from Joe Louden, apart from her love for him, whereas he would have been much the same whether loved by Ariel or another. In short, she is a fairy princess, born to wait and be wooed.

Three years later Mr. Tarkington published an odd essay in fiction The Guest of Quesnay. The scene of the book is in France; its motive is the effect of shock on character. The hero, Harrabee Harman, a blackguard of the first water, has a motor accident the accident wipes his mind clean. He becomes as a babe, and has to be taught

as a child is taught. With this fantastic, semi-psychological business Mr. Tarkington has no sort of success. One only has to compare the book with any of Wells, or with Mr. Machen's intense, troubled studies, or the less occult but mysteriously searching stories of Vincent O'Sullivan, to see how bad The Guest of Quesnay is. Yet there are astonishingly good things in this book. There is a divine waiter, 'the most henlike waiter in France'; there is vivid coloring, strong and clean; there is an excellent sketch of New York low life in the person of. Mr. Earl Percy; and there is one girl, Anne Elliott a bold choice in names - who can call cousins with Dolly of the Dialogues for wit, and is a far more attractive creature.

It gives, too, does this book, an extreme instance of Mr. Tarkington's preoccupation with clothes-men's clothes. The story is told by an American painter resident in France. Quite early in the book he informs us that his friend's sister, Elizabeth Ward, 'appreciated my going to some pains with the clothes I wore when I went to their house': and at a dinner party in the remote country given by this same Elizabeth, the unfortunate painter is forced to meditate thus:

Looking over the men of the Quesnay party or perhaps I should signify a reversal of that and say a glance of theirs at me - revealed the importance of a particular length of coat-tail, of a certain

rich effect obtained by widely separating

the lower parts of the waistcoat, of the display of some imagination in the buttons upon the same garment, of a doubledback arrangement of cuffs, and of a specific design or dimension of tie. Marked uniformity in these matters denoted their necessity; and clothes differing from the essential so vitally as did mine must have seemed immodest, little better than no clothes at all.

The poor devil, it should be explained, was wearing a suit bought 'four, five, or six years ago': this business of rai

ment is important, symbolically. I shall return to it later.

Before considering Mr. Tarkington's best novels The Flirt, Turmoil, and The Magnificent Ambersons-I must cry the praise of those inimitable books about childhood and youth-Penrod, Penrod and Sam, and Seventeen. They are as different in their humor, their observation, their veracity, as Huckleberry Finn or The Golden Age. The episode of Penrod and the tar is Homeric in its gay simplicity and directness, as Dickens is Homeric. There are things one does not quite understand. In Seventeen that entrancing little girl Jane, Willie Baxter's sister, is encouraged to talk by her mother in a way which would be considered sneakish over here; and it is quite impossible for me to believe that even in the coolest winter any grown-up person, male or female, would have tolerated Miss Pratt'one of the noblest' as poor Willie calls her. This is how this excruciating girl of sixteen years old talks to everyone, mind you:

'Oh, goody-cute! Here's big Bruvva Josie-Joe. Stroke big Bruvva Josie-Joe's pint teeks, darlin' Flopit. . . . 'At's nice! Stroke him gently, p'eshus Flopit, an' nen we'll coax him to make pitty singin' for us, like us did yestiday.' She turned to William. 'Coax him to make pitty singin'? I love his voice I'm dest crazy over it. Is n't oo'?'

This horrible child burbles and lisps through a hot summer in this way, and no one kills her. The thing is as incredible as it is indecent. Miss Pratt would have been murdered by goaded parents. I shiver to think of the agony Mr. Tarkington must have undergone while transmitting the creature's conversations. It hurts to read it. Seventeen is as good, though, as Penrod. Never has there been quite such a study in calf love; and never, I insist, has there been a more desirable child than Jane, the infatuated William's sister.